A prolific writer and translator of plays for Broadway, Sidney Howard is best remembered today as the author of the screenplay for the 1939 adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (1936). Although he was the highest-paid screenwriter of his day, his heart lay in writing plays in New York, where he had twenty-seven productions staged, thirteen of them originals. Howard considered a play as a vehicle for the actor, and he thought the playwright's job was providing actors with the raw material from which they might create vivid and memorable characters. The most memorable of Howard's characters are women, strong and pragmatic in their battles with men and life. Since Howard saw the play as a construction for the actor, he was not overly concerned with authorial style or originality. Of his many Broadway productions, more than half were adaptations of foreign plays, and some of those...