Sidney Coe Howard was born in Oakland, California, but found his spiritual home on the East Coast. After he began screenwriting, Howard was torn between the unique qualities of the West Coast and his base in the East. However, his insistence on spending most of his time in the East only slightly hampered his career.

Howard was the son of John Lawrence Howard, a steamship company executive, and Helen Coe Howard, a pianist and organist. Ill with tuberculosis at nineteen, Howard spent a year at a Swiss sanatorium. This isolation and introspection resulted in his first serious writings of journals and letters. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at Harvard, where he received an M.A. in literature. During World War I he was an ambulance driver and later a flyer, receiving the Silver Star.

Howard began his first professional writing as a...