American playwright who helped to bring psychological as well as theatrical realism to the American stage.

Howard graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1915 and studied under George Pierce Baker at his Harvard Workshop 47. In World War I Howard served with the American ambulance corps and later was a captain in the U.S. Air Corps. He was on the editorial staff of the humour magazine Life in 1919–22 and in 1923 was a feature writer for William Randolph Hearst's International Magazine.

Howard's best-known plays are They Knew What They Wanted (1924), a mellow story of an aging Italian immigrant in California and his mail-order bride that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 and was the basis of Frank Loesser's musical The Most Happy Fella (1957); The Silver Cord (1926), a devastating portrait of a mother and the effects of her possessiveness on her sons' lives; and Yellow Jack (1934, in collaboration with Paul de Kruif), a dramatized documentary of the conquest of yellow fever. Other works include Lute Song (1930, with Will Irwin), The Late Christopher Bean (1932, an adaptation from a French play by René Fauchois), and Dodsworth (1934, adapted from Sinclair Lewis' novel). In the 1930s Howard wrote a number of screenplays for Hollywood, notably the screen adaptations of Lewis' novels Arrowsmith (1931) and Dodsworth (1936) and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1939).