page_title: Clyde Fitch
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Clyde Fitch / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Color lithograph poster for "Girls", a comedy by American dramatist Clyde Fitch (1865-1909)
context_page_description: Clyde Fitch was an American dramatist, the most popular writer for the Broadway stage of his time.
context_section_description: Born in Elmira, New York, and educated at Holderness School and Amherst College (class of 1886), William Clyde Fitch wrote over sixty plays, thirty-six of them original, ranging from social comedies and farces to melodrama and historical dramas.
  His father, Captain William G. Fitch, a graduate of West Point and Union officer in the Civil War, encouraged his son to become an architect or to engage in a career of business; but his mother, Alice Clark, in whose eyes he could do no wrong, always believed in his artistic talent. (For her son's final resting place, she would hire the architectural firm of Hunt & Hunt to design the sarcophagus set inside an open Tuscan temple at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.) Fitch graduated from Amherst in 1886, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity.  As an undergraduate, "he dazzled his fellow students with his flair for dress and his virtuosity as an amateur actor."
  Fitch was one of the first American playwrights to publish their plays. His first work of note was Beau Brummell (1890), set in the English Regency, which became a lucrative showcase for actor Richard Mansfield (1857–1907), who would play the title role for the rest of his life. His 1892 play Masked Ball (an adaption from Alexandre Bisson's Le Veglione) would be the first time that producer Charles Frohman put Maude Adams opposite John Drew Jr., a pairing which led to many successes.  In 1901, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines made a star of Ethel Barrymore.; "Fitch had a special talent for writing female characters that female stars could act agreeably," theater critic and historian Brooks Atkinson wrote of him in his history of Broadway.
  Fitch was renowned in his time for works such as Nathan Hale (1898), The Climbers (1901), The Girl with the Green Eyes (which ran 108 performances at the Savoy Theatre in 1902 and starred Robert Drouet as John Austin), The Woman in the Case (which also starred Drouet and ran for eighty-nine performances at the Herald Square Theatre in 1905),The Truth (1907), The City (1909), and Girls (1910). His works were popular on both sides of the Atlantic. His play based on the heroine of John Greenleaf Whittier's poem Barbara Frietchie met with mixed reviews in 1899 because of the romance he added to the tale, but it would be successfully revived a number of times. In 1896, he wrote the lyrics to a popular song Love Makes The World Go 'Round, with an arrangement by William Furst.
  In December 1905, Fitch visited novelist Edith Wharton in her Park Avenue apartment to discuss collaborating on a dramatization of her new novel The House of Mirth.  Wharton was not a fan of Fitch's plays, which she regarded as more commercial than artistic, but knew him to be a consummate professional and the most likely writer to be able to bring Lily Bart's story to the stage.  She also enjoyed his ironic sense of humor. (Wharton described her visitor as "a plump showily dressed little man, with his olive complexion and his beautiful Oriental eyes full of wit and understanding.")  In the following months, they met in Paris and at the Mount, Wharton's estate in Massachusetts, to work on drafts, with Wharton taking responsibility for the dialogue and Fitch for the plot revisions.  At one point, when the work was not going well, Wharton in frustration asked Fitch why he had ever thought her novel could be turned into a successful play.  Incredulous, Fitch replied that he never had thought that it was a plausible endeavor.  It then became clear, to their great amusement, that each had been set up (probably by producer Charles Frohman) to believe that the project had been enthusiastically initiated by the other and, seduced by the thought of working with a famous person in another field, they had each agreed to collaborate.  The play was the critical and commercial failure Wharton feared it would be, but the two became good friends.
  Fitch's career spanned a brief two decades, but he earned upwards of $250,000 from his plays at a time when a dollar a day was the working wage. He directed a few of his plays himself and was 
caption: Poster for Clyde Fitch's comedy Girls, 1910
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