William de Mille decided on a career in drama while attending Columbia University at the turn of the twentieth century. He pursued success in the New York theater world with vigor and received considerable acclaim until a variety of factors drew him into motion-picture production in 1914. Even there, the plays he had written and produced influenced the now-better-known contributions he made in Hollywood.

Anne Edwards reports in The DeMilles: An American Family (1988) that about the time William Churchill de Mille was born, on 25 July 1878, his father, Henry Churchill de Mille, was beginning to teach at Columbia Grammar School, and his mother, Beatrice de Mille, was establishing herself as a promoter of her husband's writing by selling one of his short stories to Leslie's Weekly. (She later performed a similar role for her sons.) By the time William's only brother, Cecil B. DeMille, was born in 1881, Henry was close...