Chicago playwright, theatrical director and business manager of the Goodman Theatre.

Cloyd Simmons Head was born in 1886, the son of a Chicago publisher of medical books. He grew up in Oak Park, attended Northwestern University and settled in Chicago.

His published work includes an unusual play in verse, The Grotesques: A Decoration in Black and White, which in 1915 was produced by Maurice Browne’s Chicago Little Theatre and became so widely praised for its poetry and theatrical innovation that Harriet Monroe took the unusual step of devoting an entire issue of Poetry magazine to publishing it. This and other works by Head are representative of the Little Theater movement, which attempted to create and stage new, often experimental plays inspired by issues of social and artistic concern, in contrast to the commercial theatre that dominated most American stages.

In 1920, Head married Eunice Tietjens: poet, novelist, journalist and Associate Editor of Poetry magazine. They had one son, Marshall Head. Cloyd wrote a few more plays and several essays on the theatre and then briefly served as business manager of the Goodman Theatre before resigning, along with artistic director Thomas Wood Stevens, in the wake of disagreements over the theatre’s direction.

For the rest of his life, Cloyd divided his time between Chicago and Coconut Grove, Florida, interspersed with long periods of travel through the South Seas, Europe, the Middle East, Central America and Africa. In the late 1930s he taught theatre at the University of Miami and founded a community theatre group called the Miami Players, with whom he directed several plays. During World War II and into the late 1940s he served as a radio commentator for WMAQ 670 AM in Chicago. One of his radio series, "In Our Town", looked into the various public institutions and businesses across Chicago. In between his travels he often served as a speaker on foreign affairs.

After Eunice’s death in 1944 he married Shirley Haycraft of Florida. They had no children. He died in Chicago in 1969.