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Person who writes plays
A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays.

The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks. These early plays were for annual Athenian competitions among play writers held around the 5th century BC. Such notables as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes established forms still relied on by their modern counterparts. For the ancient Greeks, playwriting involved poïesis, "the act of making". This is the source of the English word poet. Despite Chinese Theatre having performers dated back to the 6th century BC with You Meng, their perspective of theatre was such that plays had no other role than "performer" or "actor", but given that the performers were also the ones who invented their performances, they could be considered a form of playwright. Outside of the Western world there is Indian classical drama, with one of the oldest known playwrights being Śudraka, whose attributed plays can be dated to the second century BC. The Nāṭya Shāstra, a text on the performing arts from between 500BC 500AD, categorizes playwrights as being among the members of a theatre company, although playwrights were generally the highest in social status, with some being kings.

In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle wrote his Poetics, in which he analyzed the principle of action or praxis as the basis for tragedy. He then considered elements of drama: plot (μύθος mythos), character (ἔθος ethos), thought (dianoia), diction ([[Lexis (Aristotle)), music ([[Melody), and spectacle (opsis). Since the myths on which Greek tragedy were based were widely known, plot had to do with the arrangement and selection of existing material.

Contemporary playwrights in the United States are affected by recent declines in theatre attendence. No longer the only outlet for serious drama or entertaining comedies, theatrical productions must use ticket sales as a source of income, which has caused many of them to reduce the number of new works being produced. For example, Playwrights Horizons produced only six plays in the 2002–03 seasons, compared with thirty one in 1973–74. Playwrights commonly encounter difficulties in getting their shows produced and often cannot earn a living through their plays alone, leading them to take up other jobs to supplement their incomes.

Today, theatre companies have new play development programs meant to develop new American voices in playwriting. Many regional theatres have hired dramaturges and literary managers in an effort to showcase various festivals for new work, or bring in playwrights for residencies. Funding through national organizations, such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Theatre Communications Group, encouraged the partnerships of professional theatre companies and emerging playwrights. Playwrights will often have a cold reading of a script in an informal sitdown setting, which allows them to evaluate their own plays and the actors performing them. Cold reading means that the actors haven't rehearsed the work, or may be seeing it for the first time, and usually, the technical requirements are minimal. The O'Neill Festival offers summer retreats for young playwrights to develop their work with directors and actors. Playwriting collectives like 13P and Orbiter 3 gather members together to produce, rather than develop, new works. The idea of the playwriting collective is in response to plays being stuck in the development process and never advancing to production.