You Can't Take It with You | Moss Hart Biography
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart are remembered as masters of comedic playwriting. Each made important contributions to the American theater on his own, but they are best known for the successful and influential comedies they wrote together in the 1930s.
George S. Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 16, 1889, the descendent of early German Jewish immigrants. After graduating from high school in 1907, he briefly attended law school. Disenchanted with legal studies, he dropped out and proceeded to take on a series of odd jobs, ranging from salesman to stenographer. At the age of twenty he left Pittsburgh for New York City and began writing for the New York Evening Mail. After a stint as a columnist for the Washington Times—which ended when his editor objected to the young columnist's harsh satire—Kaufman returned to New York and soon became a theater news reporter for the New York Times. Later he was promoted to drama editor, a post he never gave up, even when he attained success as a playwright.
Although he rarely smiled and sometimes appeared almost gloomy, he was famous for his devastating sense of humor, particularly his one-liners. His peers considered him to be, as his friend Alexander Woollcott described him in Brooks Atkinson's Broadway, "the first wit of his time." Kaufman began applying this wit to playwriting in 1917. He would eventually become known as the "Great Collaborator," after a long career during which he collaborated on more than 40 plays. A gifted writer of dialogue, Kaufman had little interest in forming plots and left this up to his many writing partners.
Kaufman's first big hit—Dulcy, written with Marc Connelly—was produced in 1921. Both Connelly and Kaufman were part of the influential and now famous intellectual group called the Algonquin Round Table. These literary friends, who lunched and exchanged witticisms weekly at the Algonquin Hotel, included Tallulah Bankhead Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley as well as several Kaufman collaborators such as Woollcott, Edna Ferber, and Ring Lardner. But it was not until he was 40 that Kaufman teamed up with the partner with whom he would find his greatest success, Moss Hart.
Moss Hart, born October 24, 1904, was brought up in relative poverty by his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx, New York. Inspired by an aunt who loved the theater, Hart was stagestruck at a young age. While still a teenager, he worked as an office boy for a theater manager; this manager produced Hart's first dramatic effort, The Beloved Bandit, in 1923. The show opened in Chicago and immediately flopped—one critic wrote a review in the form of an obituary for the play—and Hart's boss fired him after losing $45,000 on the production. Hart, still only nineteen, went on to take a job directing social activities at resorts in the Catskills. He gained somewhat of a reputation for the amateur theatricals he organized, but the six plays he wrote during this time were all rejected by producers.
Finally, in 1929, producer Sam H. Harris agreed to stage Hart's comedy Once in a Lifetime on the condition that the young writer revise the play with the well-known Kaufman. The twenty-six-year-old Hart idolized Kaufman and was thrilled at the prospect of working with him. This initial collaboration proved difficult, but when Once in a Lifetime opened in September, 1930, it was an unqualified success. This play, a satire of the movie industry, introduced the elements that would reappear in future Kaufman and Hart productions: numerous characters, chaotic activity, and witty dialogue. In the next ten years Kaufman and Hart would collaborate on seven more plays. Their third effort, You Can't Take It with You, (1936) was their most successful and longest-running work, claiming among its honors a Pulitzer Prize. (Kaufman's second; in 1931 his Of Thee I Sing, written with Morrie Ryskind, had been the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama). Some critics consider the duo's next play, The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939)—another story about a house filled with charming eccentrics—to be their best work.
Kaufman and Hart ceased collaborating in 1940 but both men continued to find success in the theatrical world. Kaufman collaborated on numerous popular plays throughout the 1940s and 50s, though most critics find that these works do not match the quality of his earlier efforts. He died on June 2, 1961. Hart went on to write six more plays on his own, as well as four screenplays, including those for Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and A Star Is Born (1954). He won a Tony Award—formally known as an Antionette (or "Tony") Perry Award—in 1957 for directing the original production of Alan Jay Lerner's My Fair Lady. Not long before he died, on December 20, 1961, Hart completed an autobiography, Act One, which was praised by critics for its candor and insight.
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