American playwright, poet and teacher Owen Dodson was BOTD in 1914. Born in New York, he studied at Bates College and later at the Yale School of Drama, where he wrote and produced his first play Divine Comedy, a retelling of Medea set in the Depression-era South. He joined the US Army during World War Two, writing poetry and directing plays with his fellow officers. He joined the teaching faculty at Howard University in 1940, where he was chair of the drama department for 30 years, mentoring students including Debbie Allen and Essie Clark. Dodson continued to write poetry, plays and novels, claiming later that racism and homophobia had frustrated his academic and popular success. He retired from teaching in 1967, and had some success with his poetry collections The Confession Stone and The Harlem Book of the Dead, published during the Black Arts movement of the 1970s. In later life, Dodson had a relationship with writer and journalist Hilton Als, who wrote about him in his 1996 book The Women. A long-term alcoholic, Dodson died in 1983 aged 69.