MOODY, WILLIAM VAUGHN (1869-1910), American poet and playwright, was born at Spencer, Ind., July 8 1869. He was educated at Harvard (A.B. 1893; A.M. 1894) and was assistant in English there 1894-5. From 1895 to 1907 he was at the university of Chicago as instructor and, after 1901, as assistant professor. He died at Colorado Springs Oct. 17 1910. He was the author of The Masque of Judgment (1900); Poems (1901); The Fire-Bringer (1904, intended as the first member of a trilogy on the Promethean theme, of which The Masque of Judgment, already published, was the second member); The Great Divide (1907) and The Faith Healer (1909). Of these the last two were prose dramas and were very successful on the stage, especially the first. He compiled (with Robert M. Lovett) A First View of English and American Literature (1902), and edited The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton (1899, Cambridge ed.) and (with George Cabot Lodge and John Ellerton Lodge) The Poems of Trumbull Stickney (1905).
His complete works, including The Death of Eve, a fragment of the third member of the proposed trilogy mentioned above, were edited with an admirable introduction by Prof. John M. Manly (1912).
See also Daniel Gregory Mason, Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody (1913).