Rachel Crothers Biography

American dramatist, born in Bloomington, Illinois, educated at the Stanhope-Wheatcroft School of Acting. Crothers's early career in the theatre was as an actress; she directed all her own works and abandoned acting when Nora (1903), her first play, was produced. She wrote eighteen plays including The Three of Us (1906), her first major success, A Little Journey (1918), He and She (1920), Nice People (1921), Let Us Be Gay (1929), As Husbands Go (1931), When Ladies Meet (1932), and Susan and God (1937). Crothers's subject was women and the constraints of their social condition, particularly in relation to marriage and the prevailing sexual mores in the early twentieth century. She explored these subjects with a steadfast humour and a consummate stagecraft, especially in her shift from melodramatic comedies to the ‘discussion’ plays such as A Man's World (1910) and He and She.