Happy birthday, playwright Moss Hart

It is the birthday of playwright Moss Hart (1904), who is best remembered for teaming with George S Kaufman for a string of hit Broadway plays, including You Can't Take It With You (1936), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1937. It tells the story of a warm, wacky family's impending marriage to an young man from a stiff, cold and distant wealthy family. It is set during the Depression. The two also wrote The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), which is about a caustic man who injures himself on a ice and must remain in a wealthy Midwestern family's home for six weeks, much to their consternation. It is based on the playwrights' friend, Alexander Woollcott, who was a commentator for The New Yorker magazine.

Ring Lardner wrote You Know Me Al

Ring Lardner

It is the birthday of writer Ring Lardner (1885), who is remembered for his novel You Know Me Al (1916), a collection of satirical vernacular letters by a fictional bush league baseball player to his friend back home in Indiana. The series first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. Lardner also wrote many short stories, including The Golden Honeymoon (1922), an amusing tale of a retired couple who travels by train to St. Petersburg for vacation.

For many years, Lardner wrote the nationally syndicated column In the Wake of the News for the Chicago Tribune. The column appeared in more than 100 newspapers around the country and made Lardner a household name. When the Black Sox scandal broke in 1919, Lardner felt betrayed by his beloved Chicago White Sox. Some White Sox players, it developed, had taken bribes to make sure the Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series that year.

Lardner was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald and other contemporary writers. Famed editor Max Perkins worked with both of them. Perkins introduced Lardner to Ernest Hemingway, who had tried to emulate Lardner's style back in high school. However, no friendship developed between Lardner and Hemingway. English writer Virginia Woolf admired Lardner's writing, and he was considered one of the best humorists in America in his time.

Lardner collaborated with Broadway playwright George S. Kaufman to write June Moon, a comedy love story with lyrics and music by Lardner. It was a Tin Pan Alley romance based on Lardner's short story Some Like Them Cold. It was adapted for a 1937 film called Blonde Trouble. It was adapted for the live CBS television anthology program Studio One in 1949 and again, in 1974, for PBS.

Lardner got started as a sports reporter by stealing a job from his brother. Ring was working as a bookkeeper for a gas company in South Bend, Indiana, where his brother worked while moonlighting as a corespondent for The South Bend Times. A man from the paper came to offer the brother a staff job but Ring intercepted the message, told the man that his brother was locked in a contract he couldn't break, and offered himself as an alternative. Ring Lardner was hired and began his career in the newspaper business.

Happy birthday, Ira Gershwin

It is the birthday of lyricist Ira Gershwin (1896), who collaborated with his younger brother George Gershwin to produce such memorable songs as Someone to Watch Over Me, The Man I Love, Embraceable You, I Got Rhythm, Fascinating Rhythm, and They Can't Take That Away From Me. With his brother, George S. Kaufman, and Morrie Ryskind, he won the first Pulitzer Prize for Songwriting in 1932 for the musical comedy Of Thee I Sing. In collaboration with novelist DuBose Heyward, he wrote the libretto for his brother's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. After his brother's death in 1937, Ira collaborated with composers Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Kurt Weill. Here is Frank Sinatra with the Brothers Gershwin's hit Someone to Watch Over Me from the 1926 musical Oh, Kay.

Happy birthday, Moss Hart

Moss Hart

It is the birthday of playwright Moss Hart (1904), who is best remembered for teaming with George S. Kaufman for a string of hit Broadway plays, including You Can't Take It With You (1936), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1937. It tells the story of a warm, wacky family's impending marriage to an young man from a stiff, cold and distant wealthy family. It is set during the Depression.

The two also wrote The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), which is about a caustic man who injures himself on a ice and must remain in a wealthy Midwestern family's home for six weeks, much to their consternation. It is based on the playwrights' friend, Alexander Woollcott, who was a commentator for The New Yorker magazine.

Hart's first Broadway hit was Once in a Lifetime (1930), which he wrote with Kaufman. It deals with the arrival of talking pictures in the movie industry, and is packed with a cast of zany characters. How he came to work with Kaufman is a fascinating tale in theater lore.

In 1929, 25-year-old Hart was an aspiring playwright with a stack of scripts and no productions. He attracted the attention of high-powered theater producer Sam Harris, who offered to have Hart's play about the talkies adapted as a musical. Hart declined but Harris told him he'd produce his play if he'd work with established playwright Kaufman, then 40, to polish it. They wrote and rewrote until it was right. The play was a success and one of Broadway's legendary writing teams was born.

The two only worked together for 10 years. Their other plays together were Merrily We Roll Along (1934), I'd Rather Be Right (1937), The Fabulous Invalid (1938), The American Way (1939), and George Washington Slept Here (1940).

Each went on to write successful plays separately and with other collaborators. and to direct other hits. They remained good friends, and Hart's 1959 autobiography  was widely considered a tribute to his writing partner.