20th-century American dramatists and playwrights

Mark Dunn (born July 12, 1956, in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American author and playwright. He studied film at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) followed by post-graduate work in screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin moving to New York in 1987 where he worked in the New York Public Library while writing plays in his free time.
Among the 35 plays Dunn has written (as of 2023), Belles and Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain have been produced over one hundred and fifty times. Dunn served as playwright-in-residence with the New Jersey Repertory Company and the Community Theatre League in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.Dunn is the author of the popular "progressively lipogrammatic" novel Ella Minnow Pea (2001).
In 1998, Dunn sued the writers, distributors and producers of The Truman Show, claiming that the story was based on a play he had written and performed Off-Broadway in 1992, Frank's Life.

Josefina Niggli (1910–1983; birth name was Josephine) was a Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist. Writing about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement, she was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her egalitarian views of gender, race and ethnicity were progressive for their time and helped lay the groundwork for such later Chicana feminists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. Niggli is now recognized as "a literary voice from the middle ground between Mexican and Anglo heritage." Critic Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez has written that Niggli should be considered on a par with such widely praised Spanish-language contemporaries as Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán and Nellie Campobello. She is thought to be the only Mexican-American woman to have a theatre named after her, the Niggli Studio Theater at Western Carolina University.

Nancy Hamilton (July 27, 1908 - February 18, 1985) was an American actress, playwright, lyricist, director and producer.

James Prideaux (August 29, 1927 – November 18, 2015) was an American playwright known for The Last of Mrs. Lincoln.
Prideaux was born in 1927 as James Priddy in South Bend, Indiana, the son of Lloyd Priddy, a professional photographer, and Beulah Shirey.Wanting to become an actor, he adopted a new name and relocated to Chicago and then New York, but found his metier as a writer. He wrote for magazines such as Playboy and the Ladies Home Journal and joined the Barr-Wilder-Albee Playwrights Unit, a theater workshop.For The Last of Mrs Lincoln, he won the Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright in 1973. He also wrote Postcards, Lemonade, and The Orphans.Moving to television, he wrote The Secret Storm. He became friends with Katharine Hepburn, who acted in many of his films, such as Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986), Laura Lansing Slept Here (1988), The Man Upstairs (1992). He received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Television Movie for producing Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry. In 1996, he published his memoirs Knowing Hepburn and Other Curious Experiences.He died of a stroke in West Hills, Los Angeles on November 18, 2015.

Joseph Hayes (August 2, 1918 – September 11, 2006) was an American playwright, novelist and screenwriter born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of Harold Joseph, a furniture dealer, and Pearl M. Arnold Hayes. Hayes entered a Benedictine monastery at the age of thirteen, attending St. Meinrad Seminary High School in southern Indiana for two years, though graduated from Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis in 1936. He married Marrijane Johnston in 1938 and they had three children: Daniel, Gregory, Jason. Hayes studied at Indiana University, along with his wife, from 1938 to 1941.In 1949, his play, "Leaf and Bough", was performed on Broadway. In 1954, he wrote the novel The Desperate Hours, his most successful work. In an interview in 1987, Hayes said of the novel that his main influence was "desperation": "I wrote it in six weeks, working 16 to 17 hours a day." Regarding the home invasion that occurred in the novel, he said it "was the most dramatic thing I could think of that would relate to the most people."Hayes wrote the Broadway play The Desperate Hours, which won the 1955 Tony Award for Best Play, was awarded an Edgar for Best Screenplay by the Mystery Writers of America for the 1955 film version, and received the Indiana Authors Day Award for the novel version. He was the first individual to write a novel, play, and screenplay of the same story. Hayes later wrote the screenplay for a 1990 re-make, about which he said "Since I'm the only writer who has ever done novel, play and screenplay solo from a single work of his own I can't let anyone else at it."Hayes co-wrote with his wife both the original novel (1956) and screenplay for the Walt Disney movie Bon Voyage! in 1962. Hayes also wrote his final Broadway play, Calculated Risk in 1962.
Among his other novels are The Hours After Midnight, Don't Go Away Mad, The Third Day, The Deep End, Like Any Other Fugitive, The Long Dark Night, Missing and Presumed Dead, Island on Fire, Winner's Circle, No Escape, and The Ways of Darkness.Among his other plays are The Happiest Millionaire, The Midnight Sun, The Deep End, Is Anyone Listening?, Summer in Copenhagen, Impolite Comedy, and Come into my Parlor.Hayes was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Service Award from Indiana University in 1970, and received the Honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Indiana University in 1972. Hayes died of Alzheimer's disease in 2006. Survivors included three sons, ten grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren.

Heinrich Eduard Jacob (7 October 1889 – 25 October 1967) was a German and American journalist and author. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin and raised partly in Vienna, Jacob worked for two decades as a journalist and biographer before the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Interned in the late 1930s in the concentration camps at Dachau and then Buchenwald, he was released through the efforts of his future wife Dora, and emigrated to the United States. There he continued to publish books and contribute to newspapers before returning to Europe after the Second World War. Ill health, aggravated by his experiences in the camps, dogged him in later life, but he continued to publish through to the end of the 1950s. He wrote also under the pen names Henry E. Jacob and Eric Jens Petersen.

A. J. Carothers (October 22, 1931 – April 9, 2007) was an American playwright and television writer, best known for his work with Walt Disney.

Gilda Galán (January 16, 1917 – June 21, 2009) was a Puerto Rican actress, comedian, writer, composer, scriptwriter and poet. The veteran actress, whose career spanned decades, enjoyed one of the longest careers in the history of the Puerto Rican entertainment industry.

Edwin DuBose Heyward (August 31, 1885 – June 16, 1940) was an American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy. He and his wife Dorothy, a playwright, adapted it as a 1927 play of the same name. The couple worked with composer George Gershwin to adapt the work as the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. It was later adapted as a 1959 film of the same name.
Heyward also wrote poetry and other novels and plays. He wrote the children's book The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (1939).

James Erwin Schevill (June 10, 1920 – January 30, 2009) was an American poet, critic, playwright and professor at San Francisco State University and Brown University, and the recipient of Guggenheim and Ford Foundation fellowships.