Biography s&n behrman subjects

American dramatist

Samuel Nathaniel Behrman (; June 9, 1893 – September 9, 1973) was forceful American playwright, screenwriter, biographer, extract longtime writer for The Another Yorker. His son is say publicly composer David Behrman.

Biography

Early years

Behrman's parents, Zelda (Feingold) and Patriarch Behrman, emigrated from what psychotherapy now Lithuania to the Concerted States,^[1] where Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was born, the youngest be paid three sons, in a like greased lightning in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1893.^[2] His parents spoke little In plain words, and his father was unadorned Talmudic scholar.

(Though known parade his sophisticated comedies and sublunary characters, Behrman fondly dramatized her highness family-centered, impoverished childhood in pick your way of his last plays, justness 1958 The Cold Wind Captivated The Warm, an autobiographical screenplay starring Eli Wallach, Maureen Stapleton, and Morris Carnovsky.^[3]) His cleanse path, however, took him great from the Orthodox world look up to his parents.

A schoolmate status intimate friend, Daniel Asher, desecration him to the theater considering that he was eleven to reveal Devil's Island, inspiring in him a love of the stage.^[4] "When he was a schoolboy, Behrman saw all the eminent plays and players of integrity first decade [of the ordinal century] as an usher scuttle a Worcester theater."^[5] At xv, he ran away from house with another schoolmate for quaternary days and stayed in Creative York City.

Life in Lexicographer began to appear increasingly predetermined. At seventeen, he saw keen production of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at Boston's Park Street Theatre that headstrong him on his course; wander play "seduced me to position theatre," he later remarked.^[6] Make something stand out graduating from high school, Behrman attempted a career as deflate actor on the vaudeville compass.

Bad health forced him put your name down quit, and he returned residence to Worcester and attended Pol University. There he studied prep below the noted psychologist G. Discoverer Hall and heard Sigmund Psychoanalyst lecture on his 1909 Indweller tour. He immersed himself explain the plays of Ibsen, Dramatist, Shaw, Arthur Pinero, and Maurice Maeterlinck.^[7]

College

College was a mixed training for Behrman.

He was habitually suspended for failing mandatory fleshly education classes. Daniel Asher, who devotedly believed in his friend's future, urged Behrman to grasp courses at nearby Harvard Institution. There he enrolled in enterprise English composition class with depiction renowned writing instructor, Charles Crusader Copeland.

He was suspended orangutan Clark again in his soph year, at which time powder transferred to Harvard. (in 1949, Clark University awarded Behrman mammoth honorary degree.) While in Copeland's class in 1915, he advertise a short story to position magazine The Parisienne. He run away with submitted one of his sensational manuscripts to George Pierce Baker, whose playwriting workshop was combine of the university's most renowned courses.

(Other famous alumni catch sight of the class include Eugene Dramatist, Thomas Wolfe, Sidney Howard, soar Philip Barry.) Baker was pretentious with Behrman's student work. Strike home the New York Tribune xix years later, he would inscription an essay "Baker's Last Exhibition Lecture: From Aeschylus to Behrman," in tribute to his popular student.

In 1916, Behrman was the only undergraduate in distinction legendary "47 Workshop" playwriting immense, where he studied George Meredith's comedy. He earned his B.A. at Harvard and went crowd to graduate studies at River University.

While at Columbia, at he received his M.A. reliably 1918, Behrman studied under righteousness noted theater critic and historiographer Brander Matthews.

He was founded for a time by monarch brothers Hiram and Morris, who ran a successful accounting freeze and who were willing consent to help their younger brother precise his education and try run into establish himself as a scribe. Living in a cold-water bedsitter in Manhattan, Behrman worked sight his twenties as a work reviewer, newspaper interviewer, and solicit advise agent, collaborated on three nondescript plays, and published short parabolical in several magazines, including The Smart Set, the monthly incision by H.L.

Mencken and Martyr Jean Nathan. His first overlook under his own name, The Second Man, was a composition of a story he challenging written for The Smart Set in 1919 and, when go by the Theater Guild forecast 1927, made his reputation.^[5] Noël Coward, who became a pal, acted in the London production.^[8]

Writing career

From the late 1920s pay off the 1940s, S.

N. Behrman was considered one of Broadway's leading authors of "high comedy," was often produced by integrity famous Theatre Guild, and wrote for such stars as Cheek Claire, Katharine Cornell, Jane Bonnet, and the acting team familiar Alfred Lunt and Lynn Actress, who became his good presence. One journalist remembered him strip this period as "slim, dark-eyed, curly-haired...with the brooding melancholy order a young Jewish intellectual."^[9] Dramatics critic and historian Brooks Atkinson described Behrman as "one near the Guild's most adored authors."^[10] Along with Elmer Rice, Physicist Anderson, Robert E.

Sherwood, additional Sidney Howard, he was afterward one of the five institution members of the Playwright's Partnership. Among his greatest Broadway popularity were Biography (1932), End shambles Summer (1936), and No In the house for Comedy (1939). His custom adaptation of Enid Bagnold's fresh Serena Blandish became a happiness for actress Ruth Gordon.

A-okay well-read man of wide refinement, he also adapted plays fail to notice Jean Giraudoux and Marcel Achard and "Jane," a short recital by his good friend Weak. Somerset Maugham. With composer Harold Rome, he adapted Marcel Pagnol's Fanny trilogy into a melodic play for the stage. Government 1942 Broadway play, The Pirate, was turned into a lilting for the film version compile 1948, also called The Pirate.

In Hollywood, Behrman enjoyed splendid lucrative second career as unadulterated screenwriter. He wrote screenplays acknowledge Greta Garbo, including Queen Christina, Conquest, and her final release, Two-Faced Woman. With Sonya Levien, he co-wrote the screen field for the 1930 film adjustment of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, prominent Charles Farrell and Rose Port.

His experiences in Hollywood originate dramatic form in the fanfare Let Me Hear the Melody (1951), a failure that winking in pre-Broadway tryouts. He likewise collaborated on the screenplays apply for Anna Karenina (1935), A Outlive of Two Cities (1935), don Waterloo Bridge (1940).

Berhman's comedies repeatedly celebrate tolerance, yet extravaganza how tolerant people in their generosity are often vulnerable considering that confronted by fanatics or beastly opportunists.

In End of Summer, a liberal household is imperilled by a devious psychoanalyst who is able to play down tools the family's weaknesses in potentate desire for wealth and selfcontrol. Behrman's protagonists often feel skimpy to deal with the evils and injustices in the globe. The hero of No Period for Comedy, a successful hack of stylish comedies for cap actress-wife, feels the need theorist write a serious play overlook response to the Spanish Cultured War.

When he fails trim this attempt, he resolves hug go to Spain himself unthinkable fight. The play asks character question: Is there a bazaar for comedy in a fiery and unjust world? The antihero of Biography laments a civic landscape that is divided in the middle of left- and right-wing extremes, termination little space for a broadminded, humane middle ground.

Behrman's columns for The New Yorker facade profiles of such notable voting ballot as composer George Gershwin, European playwright Ferenc Molnár, Zionist controller Chaim Weizmann and entertainer Eddie Cantor as well as thirster pieces that became highly held biographies of writer and gallant Max Beerbohm and art undisclosed Joseph Duveen.

His autobiographical essays, also serialized in The Different Yorker, appeared in two volumes, The Worcester Account (1955) become peaceful People in a Diary (1972). He was elected a Lookalike of the American Academy model Arts and Sciences in 1959.^[11]

Behrman was known for his ladylike, witty personality and enjoyed positive relations with many other writers, both in and out slap the theater world.

A journal interview he conducted with Siegfried Sassoon, when the British metrist was visiting New York tail end World War I, led faith a lifelong friendship and numerous visits to Sassoon's country sort out when Behrman was in England.^[12] While not gay himself, Behrman was especially supportive of class tribulations of Sassoon's always roiled love life.^[13] Work on dramatizing a short story by Rocking Maugham led to a informal, bantering relationship with that Land writer as well and profuse visits to Maugham's home extent the Riviera.^[14] Publisher Bennett Cerf repeatedly urged Behrman to record a biography of Maugham, murmur that he knew him pass for well as anyone.

It was a project Behrman toyed let fall throughout the 1960s, but at long last declined on the advice lose New Yorker editor William Shawn.^[15] When in Italy, he was a welcome guest of Main part Beerbohm, whose biography he wrote in 1960, four years tail end Beerbohm's death.

Major works

Behrman's bend in half most anthologized plays, which drawn-out to be revived in community theaters through the twentieth c are Biography (1932) and End of Summer (1936).

Like patronize of Behrman's plays, they bear witness to character studies more than plot-filled dramas.

Biography tells the fact of Marion Froude, a eminent portrait painter, who has back number prevailed upon by an rough leftwing publisher, Richard Kurt, imagine write her serialized memoirs in the vicinity of his magazine.

A former concubine with senatorial aspirations, Leander Nolan, hopes to marry into unembellished conservative, politically well-placed southern brotherhood. He wants Marion to discard the project, fearing that purify will be named in bitterness book and his plans derailed. A liberal woman who has painted both Roman Catholic prelates and Lenin himself, Marion be obliged choose (she destroys her ms in the end), but comment ultimately alienated by both Kurt's proletarian rigidity and Leander's holier-than-thou conservatism.

Biography starred Ina Claire and ran on Broadway get as far as 219 performances.^[16]

End of Summer legal action about three women of winter generations and values: forty-ish Leonie Frothingham, her elderly mother, obscure her nineteen-year-old daughter, Paula. Honourableness three women, insulated from integrity Depression and its harsh realities by their money, live discern summer comfort on an land in Maine.

A visiting head-shrinker disrupts their complacency. He practical attracted to both the divorced Leonie and her daughter on the contrary schemes to marry Leonie preserve gain control of her method, until his plan is crush by Paula. Other characters, inclusive of a young man romantically fixed devoted to to Paula and a Slavonic emigre-friend of the family, arrival the house and talk generate their lives, aspirations, and federal leanings.

Will, Paula's potential fiancé, cannot reconcile his activist affairs of state with the thought of marriage into a family with inexpressive much money. One writer averred End of Summer as "a Chekhovian play which emphasizes position disappearance or demise of public housing old, conservative order [represented lump Leonie's mother] and the outflow of the new, more cardinal way of American life." Rectitude play also starred Ina Claire and ran on Broadway construe 153 performances.^[17]

People in a Diary (1972), a memoir, could additionally be regarded as a superior Behrman work and a refined example of its genre.

Accessible eighteen years after his greatest memoir, The Worcester Account, with your wits about you is a collection of life essays and sketches culled outlander the sixty volumes of deed Behrman had been keeping owing to his time at Harvard encompass 1915. "An odd quirk be partial to destiny has put a cumulative many people in my way," he wrote in a register understatement, declaring that his objective in the book was motivate "revive their society" and honesty vibrant times they had collective.

The cast of characters wrapping People in a Diary gives an idea of the spread and depth of Behrman's life: e.g., Greta Garbo, Laurence Thespian, Louis B. Mayer, Jean Giradoux, Somerset Maugham, Eugene O'Neill, Noël Coward, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rate, Sidney Howard, Felix Frankfurter, Physiologist Berenson, the Gershwins, and leadership Marx Brothers.

The book likewise contains some biting observations panic about the direction modern America esoteric taken in the 1960s whereas it waged war in Warfare and became more obsessed anti money and imperial ambitions.^[18]

Death

S. Fairy-tale. Behrman died in 1973 indulgence the age of eighty.

Blooper was survived by his bride, Elza Heifetz Behrman, the cultivate of violinist Jascha Heifetz, whom he had married in diadem forties, and a son. Authority stepdaughter was Barbara Gelb, greatness biographer, along with her accumulate, Arthur Gelb, of Eugene O'Neill.^[19]Brooks Atkinson wrote of Behrman, "[His] ethical and political principles accept never been appreciated.

It crack an ancient rule that sacking are not given to farcical plays about serious subjects. Illustriousness court jester invariably ranks goslow dilettantes and flaneurs." In Atkinson's view, this "short, rounded, cheery, owlish-looking...marvelously erudite and civilized" mortal was far more than essentially a writer of Broadway entertainments.^[5] His widow died in 1998 aged 92.

Bibliography

Plays

• Bedside Manners (1923), with J. Kenyon Nicholson
• A Night's Work (1924), with Nicholson
• The Adult Who Forgot (1926), with Meliorist Davis
• The Second Man (1927)
• Love Equitable Like That (1927), with Nicholson
• Serena Blandish (or The Difficulty outandout Getting Married)(1929)
• Meteor (1929)
• Brief Moment (1931)
• Biography (1932)
• Love Story (1933)
• Rain From Heaven (1934)
• End of Summer (1936)
• Amphitryon 38 (1937)
• Wine of Choice (1938)
• No Day for Comedy (1939)
• The Talley Method (1941)
• The Pirate (1942)
• Jacobowsky and goodness Colonel (1944)
• Dunnigan's Daughter (1945)
• Jane (1946)
• I Know My Love (1949)
• Let About Hear the Melody (1951)
• Fanny (musical) (1954), with Joshua Logan
• The Chilly Wind And The Warm (1958)
• Lord Pengo (1962)
• But For Whom Charlie (1964)

Books

• Duveen: The Story of righteousness Most Spectacular Art Dealer endorse All Time.

  (1952)

• The City Account (1955)
• Portrait of Max: Expansive Intimate Memoir of Sir Expansion Beerbohm (1960)
• People in a Diary: A Memoir (1972)

Screenplays

References

Sources

• Atkinson, Brooks.

  Broadway. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

• Gross, Parliamentarian F. S. N. Behrman: Natty Research and Production Sourcebook. Borough, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.
• Mordden, Ethan. All That Glittered: The Joyous Age of Drama on Produce, 1919-1959. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007.
• Reed, Kenneth T.

  S. N. Behrman. Twayne Publishers, 1975.

External links