Mitchell, Langdon Elwyn, 1862-1935

Mitchell wrote the plays "Becky Sharp" and "The New York Idea" among many others.

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell (1862-1935), American poet and playwright, used the pseudonym John Philip Varley. His best-known plays were Becky Sharp (1899) and The New York Idea (1906). He taught playwriting at the University of Pennsylvania from 1928 to 1930. His father was S. Weir Mitchell, neurologist and author.

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell (1862-1935), American poet and playwright, used the pseudonym John Philip Varley. His best-known plays were Becky Sharp (1899) and The New York Idea (1906).

He taught playwriting at the University of Pennsylvania from 1928 to 1930. His father was S. Weir Mitchell, neurologist and author.

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell (1862-1935), American poet and playwright, used the pseudonym John Philip Varley. His best-known plays were Becky Sharp (1899) and The New York Idea (1906).

He taught playwriting at the University of Pennsylvania from 1928 to 1930. His father was S. Weir Mitchell, neurologist and author.

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell (1862-1935) was an American playwright, poet and professor of playwriting. Mitchell also wrote poetry, under the pseudonym John Philip Varley. The son of neurologist and author, Silas Weir Mitchell, Mitchell was born in Philadelphia. After studying law at Harvard and Columbia Universities, Mitchell was admitted to the New York Bar in 1886. He traveled abroad for some time and eventually returned to Philadelphia where he went into law practice.

He began his writing career with poetry, publishing collections such as Sylvian and Other Poems (1884) and Poems (1894). He also published a collection of short stories in 1896, Love in the Backwoods. When Mitchell turned his focus to playwriting, he achieved more success. His first produced play, In the Season, premiered in London in 1893 and on Broadway in 1895, but he wasn't acknowledged as an important playwright until his 1899 success with Becky Sharp.

An adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's classic novel, Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp starred Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, the leading actress of the day. The 1935 film adaptation of Becky Sharp, starring Miriam Hopkins, was the first full-length Technicolor film.

Other notable plays by Mitchell include The New York Idea, an examination of the emerging phenomenon of casual divorce; A Kentucky Belle; Step By Step; The New Marriage; another Thackeray adaptation, Major Pendennis; and an adaptation of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata.

In 1928, Mitchell joined fellow playwrights Jesse Lynch Williams, Lord Dunsany, Gilbert Emery and Rachel Crothers to create a playwriting course at the University of Pennsylvania, where he lectured for two years. Some of their lectures were published in The Art of Playwriting: Lectures Delivered at the University of Pennsylvania on the Mask and Wig Foundation (1928). In 1892, Mitchell married actress Marion Lea, with whom he had one son and two daughters. Mitchell died at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia on October 21, 1935.