Career
After returning to the United States he soon worked for a Minneapolis newspaper. He is best remembered for adapting, with Clemence Randolph, Somerset Maugham"s novella Rain into a 1922 smash hit play starring Jeanne Eagels. He wrote the original play, The Shanghai Gesture, produced on Broadway in 1926.
He excelled at writing plays dealing with Americans in far-off lands, an experience Colton knew firsthand from his early youth in Japan.
With these huge successes Colton was lured to Hollywood, primarily Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he wrote intertitles for some silent films and scenarios for others In the talking film era he wrote numerous screenplays.
Colton suffered a stroke in 1945. He died of a second stroke in Gainesville, Texas in 1946.
Colton, a gay man, never married.