His staged works were lauded for their innovative depiction of the black experience, most notably for doing away with the spiritual ballads and feverish dancing that dominated "Negro theatricals" of his time in favor of a more nuanced, naturalistic approach to plot and character.

He headed north, supporting himself with occasional work as a boot-black, hotel bellboy, and barber-shop porter, but eventually ended up in jail for bootlegging in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Ward rediscovered his love for writing, and eventually amassed an impressive corpus of poetry, short stories, and essays that helped him to gain entry into an extension program at the University of Utah in 1930.

[5] Following his departure from the University of Wisconsin in 1933, Ward relocated again, this time to Chicago's South Side, where he used some connections in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to become the recreation director for the Abraham Lincoln Centre.

[5] After major revisions, Ward entered his one-act play called Sick 'n Tiahd (1937) in the Chicago Repertory Company's annual theatre contest, where it earned second prize,[6] coming in close behind Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Green's work, Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936).

Determined to continue his theatrical experiments and bolstered by Wright's socialist agenda, Ward began searching for private funding and a New York venue to revive the Big White Fog.

[4] Although both critics and Ward's contemporaries celebrated the work for its somber realism and politically relevant tone, the general public disapproved of its heavy-handed leftist rhetoric and, as a result, Big White Fog closed after only sixty-four performances, taking the still fledgling Negro Playwrights Company down in its wake.

After brief stints as a factory laborer, a bootblack, and a writer for the Office of War Information, Ward eventually returned to teaching and helped to create several adult writing seminars that he led in Chicago and New Orleans.

[8] Despite the volume of his work, however, he remains little appreciated by contemporary audiences and scholars, due in part to the lack of popular support for the African-American theatre movement, but also as a direct result of the scant commercial viability of his social realist style, largely serious tone, and left-leaning politics.

[4] Nevertheless, Ward continued to live and work in Chicago, teaching drama classes for children there in 1963, helping to found the South Side Center for the Performing Arts in 1967,[1] and serving as playwright-in-residence for the Free Southern Theater based in New Orleans during the 1970s.