Sidney Kingsley Biography

American dramatist, born in Philadelphia, educated at Cornell University. Kingsley had a brief career as an actor before concentrating on writing, directing, and producing plays. His first success was Men in White (1933; Pulitzer Prize), produced at the Group Theatre, which dramatized the conflict faced by a young hospital doctor forced to choose between marriage to a wealthy woman and his medical vocation. Kingsley twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, first for The Patriots (1943), a historical chronicle about the political conflict between Thomas Jefferson's democratic idealism and Alexander Hamilton's federalism, and later for his adaptation of Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon (1951). His other plays include Dead End (1935), about New York street gangs; Ten Million Ghosts (1936), an anti-war propaganda play; The World We Make (1939); Detective Story (1949); Lunatics and Lovers (1954); and Night Life (1962). With the exception of the light-hearted Lunatics and Lovers, Kingsley's plays are intense dramas of moral and social engagement.