American naval officer and playwright. Born 1883, died 1918.
Kenneth Sawyer Goodman was the son of Chicagoan lumber magnate William Owen Goodman (1848-1936). Before entering the U.S. Navy, Lieutenant Goodman had helped create an active repertory theatre in Chicago. He wrote several one-act plays, three of them in collaboration with Ben Hecht.
In 1918, while serving at the Great Lakes Naval Base, Lt. Goodman contracted pneumonia and died, tragically young. His grieving father commissioned the architect Howard Van Doren Shaw to design a tomb for his son. The Goodman tomb, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman's final resting place, is built into a hillside, on the shore of Lake Willowmere in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery.
The Goodman Memorial Theatre, erected in 1925, is named in his honour, as is the Goodman School of Drama at DePaul University.
Partial list of plays by Kenneth Sawyer Goodman: