Dorothy Heyward

Dorothy Heyward was an American playwright whose stage adaptation gave Porgy and Bess its dramatic shape. Born Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns in Ohio, she studied playwriting at Harvard in George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop, and met DuBose Heyward at the MacDowell Colony; they married in 1923. She began adapting his novel Porgy for the stage without telling him, and the Theatre Guild production that followed ran on Broadway and supplied the scene structure the opera inherits. She went on writing after his death, including Set My People Free, a play about the Denmark Vesey rebellion.