George Pierce Baker

George Pierce Baker (1866–1935) was an American scholar and the most influential teacher of playwriting of his time. A professor at Harvard, he founded the course known as English 47 and its experimental 47 Workshop, where students wrote, staged and criticized one another's plays; his pupils included Eugene O'Neill, Thomas Wolfe, Philip Barry and S. N. Behrman. In 1925 he moved to Yale to found its department of drama, the origin of the Yale School of Drama. His books include The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist and Dramatic Technique (1919), which set out the principles he taught.