Ward Greene

Biography Greene was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1892. One of his ancestors was Gen. Nathanael Greene of the Continental Army, one of George Washington's most gifted and trusted officers. After a stint at the New-York Tribune in 1917, in 1918–1919 he went to the battlefields of France to cover the Great War for The Atlanta Journal from the perspective of Georgian troops.

He wrote articles for The American Mercury from 1925 to 1931. His first novel, Cora Potts, was published in 1929. Greene's book Death in the Deep South (Avon Publications, 1936) was a fictionalized account of the Leo Frank case. According to reviewer William Rose Benét, Death in the Deep South "reveals with startling clarity how the law works and how the press works after a particularly horrible and brutal murder." It was adapted as the film They Won't Forget in 1937.

Greene's "Happy Dan, the Cynical Dog" (Cosmopolitan magazine, 1945) was the basis for Walt Disney's animated film Lady and the Tramp (1955). King Features immediately spun off "Scamp," a minor unnamed character from the movie, into his own comic strip, written by Greene and illustrated by Dick Moores. Scamp was soon taken over by other creators, but lasted more than 30 years, until 1988.

Greene also wrote under the pseudonyms Frank Dudley and Jean Greene.

A resident of Westwood, New Jersey, Greene died in Havana, Cuba, of a pulmonary edema brought on by pneumonia while en route to a family vacation in California, a year after the movie was released.