Langdon Elwyn Mitchell

Who was Langdon Elwyn Mitchell?

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell was an American playwright popular on Broadway in the early twentieth century. He was the son of a noted writer and neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell, and the grandson of writer and physician John Kearsley Mitchell. Born in Philadelphia, he studied in Dresden and Paris, attended the Harvard and Columbia law schools, and was admitted to the New York bar in 1886. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, he wrote plays under his own name and poetry under the pen name "John Philip Varley."

Along with Clyde Fitch, William Vaughan Moody, Percy MacKaye, Ned Sheldon, and Rachel Crothers, Langdon Mitchell was regarded as one of the more serious American dramatists in an era not notable for weighty plays. He was considered a solid craftsman whose plays provided good parts for talented actors and actresses.

Mitchell enjoyed an especially productive relationship with one of the most prominent actresses of his time, Mrs. Minnie Fiske, who was one of the first actresses to play Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House on the New York stage and was renowned for her Hedda Gabler. Mrs. Fiske acted one of her most lauded roles, the conniving Becky Sharp, in 1899 in Mitchell's dramatization of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and she starred seven years later in his most famous work, The New York Idea, a play which had been written for her.