Ward Greene (1893-1956)

Ward Greene, journalist, playwright, and novelist, was born in Ashville, North Carolina in 1893, grew up in Atlanta, and died at Havana, Cuba 22 January 1956. William Randolph Hearst and Sylvan S. Byck were two of his pall-bearers. After attending the University of the South in Tennessee, he began his journalistic career as a reporter on the Atlanta (Ga.) Journal in 1913, worked a short period for the NY Herald-Tribune, and joined King Features Syndicate in 1920. He eventually became the general editor at King Features.

Writer Mel Heimer recalled the day Greene had a new intercom installed in his office at KFS -- “he called up a sub-editor and said ‘Listen’ -- whereupon he promptly played the verse and chorus of Dixie on the harmonica.” Greene wrote Cora Potts, Death in the Deep South, Route 28, Weep No More, and Ride the Nightmare, a story of a highly paid violent, lusty, drunkard comic strip artist, based roughly on the life of author William Seabrook. Death in the Deep South was compared favorably with Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy and filmed as They Won’t Forget, directed by Mervyn LeRoy with actress Gloria Dickson.

Ward Greene and Alex Raymond co-wrote the stories for Raymond's detective strip Rip Kirby. Ultimately Greene's greatest creation was the book Lady and the Tramp, which was immortalized by Walt Disney in 1954, and spun-off as a popular comic strip, Scamp, on 2 Jan 1955. The Scamp strip ran daily and Sunday until December 1977.