Background

Dorothy Heyward was born on June 6, 1890, in Wooster, Ohio. She was the daughter of Herman Luyties and Dora Virginia (Hartzell) Kuhns.

Education

Dorothy attended National Cathedral School in Washington. After graduating high school, she attended Harvard University where she studied to become a playwright.

Career

On the strength of her writing for this class, Dorothy was invited to the MacDowell Colony for Artists in Petersboro, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1922. There she met her future husband, who was also spending his first summer at the colony. During the following year, Heyward toured as a chorus girl in a musical to gain firsthand experience in the theater.

DuBose Heyward was an insurance salesman who had published two volumes of poetry; Heyward persuaded him to become a full-time writer, and they went to live in a cabin in the Great Smokies. Drawing upon his youthful experience as a cotton checker among the Gullah-speaking blacks on the waterfront of his native Charleston, South Carolina, DuBose wrote his first novel, Porgy (1925).

Heyward suggested a dramatization of Porgy, but DuBose was already working on his second novel, Angel (1926). Letting him think she was writing a mystery story, Heyward alone prepared a rough draft of the play, which he then helped to polish for production. For both of their collaborative dramatizations, Heyward supplied the technical knowledge of theater while her husband contributed his sense of local color and poetic language. Porgy, produced by the Theatre Guild, opened 10 October 1927 for a run of 217 performances; the following season, a revival ran for 137 performances. The folk-opera version, Porgy and Bess, was scored by George Gershwin and adapted by DuBose and Ira Gershwin in 1935.

Mamba's Daughters (1939), the Heywards' dramatization of DuBose's 1929 novel, was again set among the Gullah blacks of South Carolina. The play is melodramatic and awkwardly constructed. There are intervals of several years between some of the 10 short scenes. It was a popular success largely because of the use of Negro spirituals and the stirring performance of Ethel Waters as Hagar.

Heyward was less fortunate in her collaborations with other dramatists. Jonica (1930), Cinderelative (1930), and South Pacific (1943) all reached Broadway, but were unfavorably reviewed. South Pacific, written with Howard Rigsby and with incidental music by Paul Bowles, is unrelated to the later Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Heyward's South Pacific maroons a black American seaman on a Japanese-held island, where an improbable encounter with native blacks helps him to appreciate the positive values of the American society that had exploited him. The play closed after five performances.

In 1948 the Theatre Guild presented Set My People Free, a historical drama Heyward had written seven years earlier, based upon an aborted Charleston slave rebellion of the 1820s. The insurrection was led by a former slave named Denmark Vesey, but the focus of the play is on the dilemma of George Wilson, who is torn between loyalty to his race and devotion to his master. Despite encouraging reviews, the play had only 36 performances.

Heyward's two novels, like her plays, are uneven. The Pulitzer Prize Murders (1932), a haunted house mystery, is rambling and predictable. Three-a-Day (1930) is more engaging; this romance set in a theatrical milieu has a standard plot enlivened by the local color and jargon of the world of vaudeville in the 1920s. These two novels and Set My People Free, the last play she wrote alone, demonstrate the overambitiousness of her approach and the compassion for human situations she brought to her collaborative efforts.

Achievements

• Dorothy Heyward is best known for her stage adaptation of Porgy (1927), originally a short novel written in 1925 by her husband, DuBose Heyward. The play was later distilled to a libretto for George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, one of the most popular and unusual operas of the early part of the century. Heyward and her husband also wrote a number of other less successful plays, many of them focusing on the issues of class, race, and folklore that so intriguingly motivate Porgy. Their work, Nancy Ann won the Harvard Prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A DuBose Heyward Reader

    (Here is an ideal introduction to a figure whose inner con...)

    2003
  • Summertime

    (Enhanced with bold illustrations and inspired by the folk...)

  • The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes: As Told to Jenifer (Sandpiper Books) - Kindle edition by DuBose Heyward, Marjorie Flack. Children Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

    (The country bunny attains the exalted position of Easter ...)

    1939
  • Porgy and Bess

    (Alfred is pleased to present the Broadway's Best series. ...)

    1935
  • Porgy 1925
  • Mamba's daughters,: A play 1939
  • Peter Ashley 1932
  • The Half Pint Flask. 1929

Membership

Dorothy was a member of the American Dramatists Society.

Personality

Similarities of taste, temperament, and appearance were frequently noted in Heyward and her husband by their acquaintances: both were tall, slender, fair, brown-eyed, and fragile-looking.

Connections

On September 22, 1923, Dorothy married DuBose Heyward. They had a daughter Jenifer DuBose Heyward.

Father:

Herman Luyties Kuhns

Mother:

Dora Virginia (Hartzell) Kuhns

Spouse:

Edwin Heyward

August 31, 1885 – June 16, 1940

collaborator:

Moss Hart

collaborator:

Dorothy DeJagers

References

• DuBose Heyward,: The man who wrote Porgy
  1954
• Dictionary Of Literary Biography Volume 7: Twentieth-century American Dramatists [in Two Volumes]
  1981
• The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre This comprehensive guide provides coverage on American theater from its earliest history to the present, with special attention given to contemporary theater throughout the United States.
  1993