Born on December 12, 1878, in Bloomington, Illinois, Rachel Crothers graduated from the Illinois State Normal University (now Illinois State) in 1892. She studied dramatics in Boston and New York City and for a time appeared with various theatrical companies, later giving up performing to teach. Her career as a playwright began with a few minor, one-act efforts, bearing such titles as The Rector, Nora, and The Point of View, which were produced in 1902╨1904 at the Savoy and Madison Square theaters. Her first full-length Broadway play, The Three of Us, which opened in October 1906 at the Madison Square, was a highlight of the season; and for the next three decades she maintained the extraordinary average of a Broadway play a year, the majority of them popular and critical successes. Her accomplishment was made the more remarkable by the fact that she produced and directed nearly all of her plays herself. Her audiences were particularly delighted by her mastery of dialogue, her characterizations, especially of women, and her deft and often humorous advocacy of established ideals and verities in the face of contemporary social ferment. Among her greatest hits were Myself-Bettina, in which Maxine Elliott starred, 1908, A Man╒s World, 1909, He and She, 1911, Young Wisdom, 1914, The Heart of Paddy Whack, 1914, Old Lady 31, 1916, A Little Journey, 1918, Nice People, 1921, Mary the Third, 1923, Expressing Willie, 1924, A Lady╒s Virtue, 1925, Venus, 1927, Let Us Be Gay, 1929, As Husbands Go, 1931, When Ladies Meet, 1932, and her last play, Susan and God, 1937.
During World War I Crothers founded the Stage Women╒s Relief Fund, and in 1932 she helped found the Stage Relief Fund, of which she remained a director until 1951. In 1940 she led in organizing the American Theatre Wing, which operated the famed Stage Door Canteens, and remained its executive director until 1950, when she became president emeritus. Rachel Crothers died in Danbury, Connecticut, on July 5, 1958.
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