(1880-1918)
Connecticut-born Harry James Smith attended Williams College and Harvard University before embarking on a teaching career at Oberlin. In 1906, he left his academic post for an editing job at Atlantic Monthly to pay the rent while he wrote plays. He scored a success with his first produced play, Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (1911), but his second, Blackbirds (1913), flopped. Smith had a major hit with the comedy A Tailor-Made Man (1917), followed by The Little Teacher (1918), but his career ended abruptly when he was killed in an accident serving with the Canadian Red Cross during World War I.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.