Clyde Fitch

Clyde Fitch (May 2, 1865 – September 4, 1909) was an American dramatist, the most popular writer for the Broadway stage of his time (c. 1890–1909).

Born in Elmira, New York, and educated at Holderness School and Amherst College, 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 the first American playwright to publish his 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.

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