An innovator in university theater study, George Pierce Baker's pedagogy shaped the production and reception of modern drama in the United States. His famous course in dramatic technique at Harvard University, known as English 47, trained some of the most influential theater practitioners of the period--including Eugene O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, Kenneth Macgowan, and Hallie Flanagan--and the graduate program he instituted at Yale became a model for theater studies in the United States. Throughout his career as a teacher and a scholar, Baker insisted that the academic study of dramatic literature center on performance issues.

George Pierce Baker Jr. was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on 4 April 1866 into circumstances not unfavorable for raising a professor of dramatic literature. A cultivated and prosperous physician, Baker's father, George Pierce Baker, had been a student of Oliver Wendell Holmes at Harvard, and he nurtured his son's passion for theatrical performance, while insisting...