Watch Donald Ogden Stewart Videos

Donald Ogden Stewart (November 30, 1894 - August 2, 1980) was an American author and screenwriter. His hometown was Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Yale University, where he became a brother to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Phi chapter), in 1916 and was in the Naval Reserves in World War I. After the war he started to write and found success with A Parody Outline of History, a satire of The Outline of History (1920) by H. G. Wells. This led him to becoming a member of the Algonquin Round Table. Around that time a friend of his got him interested in theater and he became a noted... MORE

Donald Ogden Stewart (November 30, 1894 - August 2, 1980) was an American author and screenwriter. His hometown was Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Yale University, where he became a brother to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Phi chapter), in 1916 and was in the Naval Reserves in World War I. After the war he started to write and found success with A Parody Outline of History, a satire of The Outline of History (1920) by H. G. Wells. This led him to becoming a member of the Algonquin Round Table. Around that time a friend of his got him interested in theater and he became a noted playwright on Broadway in the 1920s. He was friends with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and Ernest Hemingway (he was the model for Bill Gorton in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). In 1924, he wrote Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad for the publishing house George H. Doran. It was a snarky send up of the ugly American tourist. He became interested in adapting some of his plays to film, but on first entering Hollywood he had to adapt the plays of others as his own were initially shelved. Once there he mostly wrote, but he also had a small part in the film Not So Dumb. By the 1930s he had LESS