Lee Wilson Dodd

Background

Dodd was born on July 11, 1879, at Franklin, Pennsylvania. He was the third son and third child of Samuel C. T. Dodd , and the first son and child of Melvina (Smith) Dodd. His father was one of the pioneers in the legal and organizational development of the oil business and became general counsel for the Standard Oil Company.

Education

Dodd was educated at Berkeley School in New York City, at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University in the class of 1899, and at the New York Law School. He took his degree in law in 1901.

Career

Dodd was admitted to the New York bar in 1902, and was for several years employed in his father's office. After his father's death in 1907, he retired and gave all his time to writing, which he had already begun in Yale, where he contributed to the college magazines. His earliest interest, and an enduring one, was in poetry, but his professional career really began with a play, The Return of Eve (1909), highly imaginative, but a blend of the poetic and the satiric, which even a good cast could not make successful. His next play, however, Speed (1911), a satire on the just opening age of automobiles and spending, made a considerable impression on the New York audience, though it did not have a long run. In 1915, he dramatized, with great success and originality, Harry Leon Wilson's His Majesty Bunker Bean. This play had a long run and was equally successful on the screen. His later plays that were produced were: The Jacknife Man (1917), a pleasing but not important dramatization, The Changelings (1923), a successful and brilliant comedy of marriage and divorce, and A Stranger in the House (1931), a satiric comedy which suffered a tragic collapse when Henry Miller, who took the leading part, as in The Changelings, was taken fatally ill on the night of the New York opening. In between his plays he wrote fiction: a very successful novel called The Book of Susan (1920), a humorous and gently ironic study of life in New Haven; Lilia Chenoworth (1922) and The Girl Next Door (1923), lighter but less successful novels; and a charming book for children, Pegeen and the Potamus, or The Sly Giraffe (1925).

In 1927 Dodd published a wise and engaging book which may outlive some of the half-baked theories it discussed with constructive irony, The Golden Complex, an essay on the more human aspects of scientific and pseudoscientific psychology. During these years he was an active member of the group contributing criticism and poetry to the Saturday Review of Literature. It is probable, however, that Dodd's place in American literature is most likely to be assured by selections from his three volumes of poetry.

His early work, A Modern Alchemist (1906), was still youthful, though containing some admirable lyrics. But The Middle Miles and Other Poems (1915), and especially The Great Enlightenment, with Other Selected Verses (1928), contain both delicate and incisive writing, with a satire on the times, "The Great Enlightenment, " which has been much quoted.

After the collapse of 1929, in which he suffered financial reverses, he devoted more time to what became a highly successful teaching career, unhappily interrupted by his death. Here his personal magnetism and esthetic wisdom made a deep impression. He was a lecturer in the English department of Smith College, 1915-1917, visiting professor at Sarah Lawrence College, 1931-33, and at Wesleyan University, 1932-1933. In 1932-1933, he was assistant professor of playwriting in the Yale School of Drama, and, at the time of his death, had just been invited to succeed Prof. George Pierce Baker in his famous playwriting course. He gave summer courses also at Bread Loaf and at Cummington. Dodd's literary work was a typical and highly interesting transitional product.

Dodd died on May 16, 1933, in New York City.

Achievements

• Dodd is one of the best examples in American literature of the impact upon the confidence and the sentiment of the nineties. Where other writers in the twenties and earlier turned harsh or cynically materialistic, Dodd, who was among the earliest to sense the change, swung into irony and satire, a much rarer phenomenon in American writing in the nineteenth century.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Modern Alchemist, and Other Poems (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from A Modern Alchemist, and Other Poems Invocat...)

  • The Book of Susan A Novel

    (This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)

  • The Changelings
  • The Golden Complex: A Defence of Inferiority
  • A Garner of Fugitive Pieces

Membership

Dodd was an active member of the group contributing criticism and poetry to the Saturday Review of Literature.

Personality

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dodd was well aware of what was happening, and endeavored by perfected literary form to make his reactions significant beyond the moment and his personal fortune. A man of infinite wit and charm and zest for living, his mind at base was sensitive and sad. In a time and country of distracted interests, he knew from early youth that his job was literature and he deserves better than some more famous men, the title of American man of letters.

Connections

Dodd spent most of his adult life in Hamden, Connecticut, a suburb of New Haven. On January 11, 1907, he married Marion Roberts Canby of Wilmington, Del. , and left two adopted children, Dorris and Alan.

Father:

Samuel C.T. Dodd

Mother:

Melvina Smith

Spouse:

Marion Roberts Canby

Daughter:

Dorris Dodd

Son:

Alan Dodd

References

• Biographical Notices of Graduates of Yale College, Including Those Graduates in Classes Later Than 1815, Who Are Not Commemorated in the Annual Obituary Records
• The Decennial Record of the Class of 1889, Vol. 4: Princeton University; 1889-1899 (Classic Reprint)
• Genealogy and history of the Daniel Dod family in America, l646-1940,