After the war, Howard made use of his proficiency at foreign languages and translated a number of literary works from French, Spanish, Hungarian, and German.

A liberal intellectual whose politics became progressively more left-wing over the years, he also wrote articles about labor issues for The New Republic and served as literary editor for the original Life Magazine.

The story of a middle-aged Italian vineyard owner who woos a young woman by mail with a false snapshot of himself, marries her, and then forgives her when she becomes pregnant by one of his farm hands, the play was praised for its un-melodramatic view of adultery and its tolerant approach to its characters.

"[4] They Knew What They Wanted won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was adapted three times into film (1928, 1930, and 1940) and later became the Broadway musical, The Most Happy Fella.

Lucky Sam McCarver, his next play, was an unsentimental account of the marriage of a New York speakeasy owner on his way up in the world with a self-destructive socialite on her way down.

This drama about a mother who is pathologically close to her sons and works to undermine their romances, the result of a decade fascinated with Freud, Oedipal complexes, and family dysfunction.

Both Howard's works The Silver Cord and Ned McCobb's Daughter ran on alternate weeks in the 1926-1927 season, produced by the Theatre Guild.

"[7] A prolific writer and a founding member of the Playwrights' Company (with Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Elmer Rice, and Robert Sherwood), he ultimately wrote or adapted more than seventy plays; a consummate theater professional, he also directed and produced a number of works.

The couple separated in 1927, and Howard's anger at the disintegration of his marriage is reflected in his bitter satire of modern matrimony, Half Gods (1929).

A particular admirer of the understated realism of French playwright Charles Vildrac, Howard adapted two of his plays into English, under the titles S. S. Tenacity (1929) and Michael Auclair (1932).

He intended to write an ironic tragedy on the theme of the destruction of such a league that would be devoted to the service rather than the conquest of humanity, [using the techniques] that made Yellow Jack such a forceful drama.

Despite his well-known left-wing political sympathies (he supported William Foster, the Communist Party candidate for president, in 1932), he became a shrewd Hollywood insider.

Sinclair Lewis was a great admirer of Howard's stage work and was pleased with his three film adaptations, and the two men (whose political opinions aligned) became good friends.

[12] After two Academy Award nominations and the Broadway success of Dodsworth, Sidney Howard was at the height of his fame in the late 1930s and appeared on the cover of Time magazine on June 7, 1937.

"[16] In his 2007 history of Broadway playwrights, Ethan Mordden wrote, "When he found his metier, Howard excelled at edgy American stories about charismatic but somewhat unlikable people.

He seemed to enjoy testing his public; or perhaps he simply saw the world as being filled with rogues..."[17] At the time of his death, Howard was working on a dramatization of Carl van Doren's biography of Benjamin Franklin.