Early years Behrman's parents, Zelda (Feingold) and Joseph Behrman, emigrated from what is now Lithuania to the United States, where Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was born, the youngest of three sons, in a tenement in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1893. His parents spoke little English, and his father was a
Talmudic scholar. (Though known for his sophisticated comedies and worldly characters, Behrman fondly dramatized his family-centered, impoverished childhood in one of his last plays, the 1958
The Cold Wind And The Warm, an autobiographical drama starring
Eli Wallach,
Maureen Stapleton, and Morris Carnovsky.) His own path, however, took him far from the Orthodox world of his parents. A schoolmate and intimate friend, Daniel Asher, brought him to the theater when he was eleven to see ''Devil's Island'', inspiring in him a love of the stage. "When he was a boy, Behrman saw all the famous plays and players of the first decade [of the twentieth century] as an usher in a Worcester theater." At fifteen, he ran away from home with another schoolmate for four days and stayed in New York City. Life in Worcester began to appear increasingly limited. At seventeen, he saw a production of George Bernard Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra at Boston's Park Street Theatre that determined him on his course; that play "seduced me to the theatre," he later remarked. After graduating from high school, Behrman attempted a career as an actor on the vaudeville circuit. Bad health forced him to quit, and he returned home to Worcester and attended Clark University. There he studied under the noted psychologist G. Stanley Hall and heard Sigmund Freud lecture on his 1909 American tour. He immersed himself in the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Arthur Pinero, and Maurice Maeterlinck.
College College was a mixed experience for Behrman. He was repeatedly suspended for failing mandatory physical education classes. Daniel Asher, who devotedly believed in his friend's future, urged Behrman to take courses at nearby Harvard University. There he enrolled in an English composition class with the renowned writing instructor,
Charles Townsend Copeland. He was suspended at Clark again in his sophomore year, at which time he transferred to Harvard. (in 1949, Clark University awarded Behrman an honorary degree.) While in Copeland's class in 1915, he sold a short story to the magazine
The Parisienne. He then submitted one of his dramatic manuscripts to
George Pierce Baker, whose playwriting workshop was one of the university's most respected courses. (Other famous alumni of the class include Eugene O'Neill, Thomas Wolfe, Sidney Howard, and Philip Barry.) Baker was impressed with Behrman's student work. In the
New York Tribune nineteen years later, he would title an essay "Baker's Last Drama Lecture: From
Aeschylus to Behrman," in tribute to his famous student. In 1916, Behrman was the only undergraduate in the legendary "47 Workshop" playwriting class, where he studied
George Meredith's comedy. He earned his B.A. at Harvard and went on to graduate studies at
Columbia University. While at Columbia, where he received his M.A. in 1918, Behrman studied under the noted theater critic and historian
Brander Matthews. He was supported for a time by his brothers Hiram and Morris, who ran a successful accounting firm and who were willing to help their younger brother complete his education and try to establish himself as a writer. Living in a cold-water flat in Manhattan, Behrman worked in his twenties as a book reviewer, newspaper interviewer, and press agent, collaborated on three undistinguished plays, and published short stories in several magazines, including
The Smart Set, the monthly edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. His first play under his own name,
The Second Man, was a dramatization of a story he had written for
The Smart Set in 1919 and, when produced by the Theater Guild in 1927, made his reputation.
Writing career From the late 1920s through the 1940s, S. N. Behrman was considered one of Broadway's leading authors of "high comedy," was often produced by the famous
Theatre Guild, and wrote for such stars as
Ina Claire,
Katharine Cornell,
Jane Cowl, and the acting team of
Alfred Lunt and
Lynn Fontanne, who became his good friends. One journalist remembered him from this period as "slim, dark-eyed, curly-haired...with the brooding melancholy of a young Jewish intellectual." Theater critic and historian Brooks Atkinson described Behrman as "one of the Guild's most adored authors." Along with
Elmer Rice,
Maxwell Anderson,
Robert E. Sherwood, and
Sidney Howard, he was later one of the five founding members of the Playwright's Company. Among his greatest Broadway successes were
Biography (1932),
End of Summer (1936), and
No Time for Comedy (1939). His stage adaptation of
Enid Bagnold's novel
Serena Blandish became a success for actress
Ruth Gordon. A well-read man of wide culture, he also adapted plays by
Jean Giraudoux and
Marcel Achard and "
Jane," a short story by his good friend
W. Somerset Maugham. With composer
Harold Rome, he adapted
Marcel Pagnol's
Fanny trilogy into a musical play for the stage. His 1942 Broadway play,
The Pirate, was turned into a musical for the film version in 1948, also called
The Pirate. In Hollywood, Behrman enjoyed a lucrative second career as a screenwriter. He wrote screenplays for
Greta Garbo, including
Queen Christina,
Conquest, and her final film,
Two-Faced Woman. With Sonya Levien, he co-wrote the
screen play for the 1930 film version of
Ferenc Molnár's
Liliom, starring
Charles Farrell and
Rose Hobart. His experiences in Hollywood found dramatic form in the play
Let Me Hear the Melody (1951), a failure that closed in pre-Broadway tryouts. He also collaborated on the screenplays for
Anna Karenina (1935),
A Tale of Two Cities (1935), and
Waterloo Bridge (1940). Berhman's comedies repeatedly celebrate tolerance, yet show how tolerant people in their generosity are often vulnerable when confronted by fanatics or ruthless opportunists. In
End of Summer, a liberal household is threatened by a devious psychoanalyst who is able to play upon the family's weaknesses in his desire for wealth and power. Behrman's protagonists often feel inadequate to deal with the evils and injustices in the world. The hero of
No Time for Comedy, a successful author of stylish comedies for his actress-wife, feels the need to write a serious play in response to the
Spanish Civil War. When he fails at this attempt, he resolves to go to Spain himself and fight. The play asks the question: Is there a place for comedy in a violent and unjust world? The protagonist of
Biography laments a political landscape that is divided between left- and right-wing extremes, leaving little space for a tolerant, humane middle ground. Behrman's columns for
The New Yorker included profiles of such notable figures as composer
George Gershwin, Hungarian playwright
Ferenc Molnár, Zionist leader
Chaim Weizmann and entertainer
Eddie Cantor as well as longer pieces that became highly regarded biographies of writer and dandy
Max Beerbohm and art dealer
Joseph Duveen. His autobiographical essays, also serialized in
The New Yorker, appeared in two volumes,
The Worcester Account (1955) and
People in a Diary (1972). He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959. Behrman was known for his warm, witty personality and enjoyed good relations with many other writers, both in and out of the theater world. A newspaper interview he conducted with
Siegfried Sassoon, when the British poet was visiting New York after World War I, led to a lifelong friendship and many visits to Sassoon's country house when Behrman was in England. While not gay himself, Behrman was especially supportive of the tribulations of Sassoon's always turbulent love life. Work on dramatizing a short story by Somerset Maugham led to a relaxed, bantering relationship with that British writer as well and many visits to Maugham's home on the Riviera. Publisher Bennett Cerf repeatedly urged Behrman to write a biography of Maugham, feeling that he knew him as well as anyone. It was a project Behrman toyed with throughout the 1960s, but ultimately declined on the advice of
New Yorker editor William Shawn. When in Italy, he was a welcome guest of Max Beerbohm, whose biography he wrote in 1960, four years after Beerbohm's death. ==Major works==