The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail | Author Biography

Jerome Lawrence was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 14, 1915. Robert E. Lee was born in Elyria, Ohio, on October 15, 1918. Although both men grew up in the same region of Ohio, attended Ohio universities, and worked in commercial radio, they did not meet each other until 1942, when they met in New York and immediately became writing partners with their production of Inside a Kid's Head, a radio play. The two men, who had already lived somewhat parallel lives, continued this trend when they both entered the armed forces that summer. They both served in the war until 1945, and together, they co-founded the Armed Forces Radio Service (1942), where they created and produced radio programs.

Following World War II, Lawrence and Lee continued to concentrate mainly on writing, producing, and directing scripts for radio shows, including The Frank Sinatra Show and The Railroad Hour. In 1955, when the advent of television reduced the amount of radio-show programming, they produced their first stage production, Inherit the Wind. The play, which has proved to be their most successful work, also introduced a technique that Lawrence and Lee would use in most of their plays—staging an historical incident to comment on a current situation. In the case of Inherit the Wind, the dramatized incident was the famous Scopes trial of 1925, in which a high-school biology teacher was put on trial for attempting to teach evolution. The play was an obvious commentary on the Communist trials instigated by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, just as The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (1971), their second most successful work, was an obvious commentary on the war in Vietnam.

Lawrence and Lee produced several more plays together from the 1970s until the 1990s, during which time they were recognized by many regional and national awards within the dramatic community. In 1990, they were both named to the Theatre Hall of Fame. Three years later, in 1993, Lawrence' s Malibu home was destroyed by the fires that were raging through California. Although many of his personal literary and art collections were lost, he was able to escape with the latest draft of Whisper in the Mind (1994), the last play that Lawrence and Lee produced in their fifty-two-year collaboration. Lee died on July 8, 1994, in Los Angeles, California, shortly before the publication of The Selected Plays of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, their final collaborative work. Lawrence currently lives in Malibu, California.