Sidney Coe Howard

Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright and screenwriter born in Oakland, California, in 1891. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and later worked with George Pierce Baker's famous Harvard Workshop 47, a training ground for several major American writers. Britannica credits him with helping bring psychological realism as well as theatrical realism to the American stage.

His best-known play, They Knew What They Wanted (1924), won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925. He also wrote notable works such as The Silver Cord and Yellow Jack, and his writing often focused on character, moral conflict, and the pressures inside families and society.

In the 1930s he also became an important Hollywood screenwriter, adapting major novels including Dodsworth and Gone with the Wind. Howard died in 1939 at just 48 years old, and he received a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for Gone with the Wind.