The Sidney Howard Memorial Award was a notable but short-lived theater prize established in 1939 by the Playwrights' Company.
He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 for his play They Knew What They Wanted,[1] which was later adapted for the screen by the first Memorial Award winner, Robert Ardrey.
Literary Prizes and their Winners gives the following description of the prize: In 1939 the five directors of the Playwrights' Company, Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Elmer Rice, Robert E. Sherwood, and John F. Wharton, established the Sidney Howard Memorial Award of $1500.
The prize ... is given annually to a new American playwright who, with no previous noteworthy success in the theater, has shown talent through the production of one or more of his plays in New York.
"[6]The inaugural prize was awarded to Robert Ardrey for his play Thunder Rock,[7] which had floundered on Broadway but went on to be an international classic.