Robert Harris Chapman

Robert Harris Chapman (April 4, 1919 – September 27, 2000) was an American playwright and longtime academic of English literature and drama at Harvard University. He is best remembered for co-authoring the 1951 Broadway play Billy Budd, adapted from Herman Melville's novel of the same name, with Louis O. Coxe. Their play won the Donaldson Award for Best First Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play in 1951.

Life and career Born in Highland Park, Illinois, Chapman earned a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Princeton University in 1941, and an honorary master's degree from Harvard in 1956. After the war, he taught briefly on the faculty of Princeton University before accepting a position as an instructor in the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked from 1948 to 1950. The two men revised the work significantly, and retitled it Billy Budd for the work's staging on Broadway in 1951.

Chapman's other plays included The General, Hero, and The Troublesome Tourist.

Chapman died at the age of 81 on September 27, 2000, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he had lived since his retirement from Harvard.