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George Pierce Baker Biography

(1866–1935), The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist, Some Unpublished Correspondence of David Garrick, Dramatic Technique



American drama teacher, born in Providence, Rhode Island, educated at Harvard. Baker later became one of Harvard's most inspirational drama teachers. His play-writing course, ‘English 47’, and the ‘47 Workshop’ which sprang from it, had an incalculable effect upon the development of the American commercial theatre in the 1920s and 1930s; his pupils included Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, Eugene O'Neill, Edward Sheldon, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe. Baker's skill lay in his capacity to nurture all the arts of the theatre through creating the conditions in which apprentice writers could make their individual experiments under his wisely practical tutelage. He moved to Yale in 1925 where he directed the University Theatre at Yale. Baker's publications include The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907), Some Unpublished Correspondence of David Garrick (1907), Dramatic Technique (1919), and Modern American Plays (1920).



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