Pulitzer Prize-winner Owen Davis (for his play Icebound, in 1923) attended UT as a subfreshman in 1888–89. He left UT to enter Harvard. After a brief stint as a mining engineer in Kentucky, where his family had moved from Portland, Maine, Davis went to New York and began to write plays. The first play he wrote was For the White Rose, which dealt with England during the War of the Roses. His first play that was produced, Through the Breakers (about shipwrecks and coastguardsmen), opened at Hartsford Theatre (Connecticut).
Between 1898 and 1921, Davis had 160 plays produced, most of them cut to the pattern of Nellie and her sister working girls—Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl and Edna, the Beautiful Typewriter Girl. One year 17 of his potboilers were playing simultaneously, solidifying Davis’s reputation as “king of the melodramas” and making him a wealthy man. Between 1910 and 1920, when the popularity of melodramas subsided, he turned to comedies, and in 1921 he began to write seriously, moving from comedy to drama. His first drama, The Detour, was considered for a Pulitzer Prize but lost out to Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, which had also been in the running.
Icebound opened February 10, 1923, at the Sam H. Harris Theater in New York, with a cast headed by Robert Ames and that included Edna May Oliver in a minor role. It is the story of a New England family that was greedy for an inheritance and awaiting the death of the mother, only to have her leave her fortune to the woman who cared for her and the black sheep of the family, with whom she was in love. The play was produced by Sam Harris and ran for 170 performances.
Davis also wrote screenplays, including The Great Gatsby in 1926. He wrote Jezebel for Tallulah Bankhead. When it was adapted to the screen in 1935, Bette Davis had the title role, and her performance won an Academy Award. His final Broadway success was Mr. and Mrs. North (1941). Davis was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and became the first president of the Dramatists Guild in 1923.
Icebound was produced on campus by the UT Players in 1929. In the cast was John Hightower, who won two Pulitzer Prizes.