Sherwood, Robert E[mmet] (1896–1955), playwright. Born in New Rochelle, New York, he attended Harvard, where he was active on the Lampoon (which his father had co‐founded) and with the Hasty Pudding Club and studied theatre history under George Pierce Baker. After spending World War I with the Canadian Black Watch, Sherwood returned home disillusioned with the governments that had brought the conflict about. After serving in various capacities at Vanity Fair, Life, and Scribner's and earning a reputation as one of the earliest serious critics of film, he found success with his first play, the antiwar comedy The Road to Rome (1927). The Love Nest (1927), The Queen's Husband (1928), and This Is New York (1930) failed to run, and his wartime romance Waterloo Bridge (1930) found a better reception in London than in New York. Nevertheless, the rest of the 1930s proved his heyday with such memorable works as Reunion in Vienna (1931), The Petrified Forest (1935), Idiot's Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), and Tovarich (1936). Sherwood's biographer has suggested that with his Lincoln play he purged himself of his war‐bred disillusionment and a negative streak that had heretofore run through his works. How this purgation affected his writing is moot, but he wrote only one other play of lasting merit, There Shall Be No Night (1940). His last works were The Rugged Path (1945), the musical Miss Liberty (1949), and the revision of Philip Barry's unfinished Second Threshold (1951). One of the founders of the Playwrights' Company, he turned to politics in his last active years, serving as a speechwriter for FDR and writing a history of Roosevelt's relationship with Harry Hopkins. Biography: The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood, John Mason Brown, 1965.

• Born: 1896 04 in New Rochelle, New York
• Died: 1955
• Occupation: Writer
• Active: '30s-'50s
• Major Genres: Comedy, Romance
• Career Highlights: The Best Years of Our Lives, Rebecca, The Petrified Forest
• First Major Screen Credit: Lucky Lady (1926)

Biography

Multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert E. Sherwood got his start in journalism as a critic and editor for both Life magazine and the New York Herald. In addition to having his plays adapted to the screen by others, Sherwood also penned or co-penned screenplays. His story for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) earned Sherwood an Oscar for Best Screenplay. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Jupiter's Darling Buy this Movie	The Bishop's Wife Buy this Movie	The Best Years of Our Lives Buy this Movie	Abe Lincoln in Illinois Buy this Movie
Rebecca Buy this Movie	Waterloo Bridge Buy this Movie	Idiot's Delight Buy this Movie	The Divorce of Lady X Buy this Movie

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Robert Emmet Sherwood (1896-1955) was an American playwright whose penetrating dramas often showed an idealistic hero confronted with war.

Robert E. Sherwood was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., on April 4, 1896. He graduated from Milton Academy (1914) and from Harvard (1917). Rejected for service in World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian Black Watch; he was wounded and gassed. He worked for Vanity Fair magazine in 1919 and a year later joined the staff of Life magazine, becoming its film editor. In 1922 he married Mary Brandon, an actress. Their daughter was born in 1923. He edited The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-23 and in 1924 became editor of Life. The first of his many film credits was Oh, What a Nurse! (1926). Sherwood made his stage debut with The Road to Rome (1927), a humorous, sophisticated treatment of Hannibal. Reunion in Vienna (1931) charmed audiences with its urbane comedy about an old love newly ignited. While publishing a novel, The Virtuous Knight (1931), he worked in Hollywood as a dialogue writer and scenarist on his own plays. Acropolis (1933), dealing with the problems of Athens and Sparta, was a quick failure. From this time, however, his works became serious.

In 1934 Sherwood was divorced; he married Madeline Hurlock Connelly in 1935. During the next few years, he reached his peak as a dramatist. The Petrified Forest (1935), a pertinent assessment of romanticism and reality in American culture, was followed by Idiot's Delight (1936). This uncanny prediction of World War II won a Pulitzer Prize. An adaptation, Tovarich (1936), preceded the brilliant Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), another Pulitzer Prize play and the first production of the Play-wrights Company, which Sherwood helped organize. There Shall Be No Night (1940), a compelling depiction of the Finish involvement in the war, won Sherwood his third Pulitzer Prize. Abe Lincoln in Illinois led to an association with Eleanor Roosevelt.

At the outbreak of World War II Sherwood entered public service as special assistant to the secretary of war (1940), director of the overseas branch of the Office of War Information (1942), and special assistant to the secretary of the Navy (1945). His film play The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) won many Academy Awards, and his historical work Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948) earned him several awards. He died in New York City on Nov. 14, 1955.

Further Reading

The major works on Sherwood are R. Baird Shuman, Robert E. Sherwood (1964), which contains biographical information and a good critical discussion of the plays, and John Mason Brown, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: Mirror to His Times, 1896-1939 (1965), an excellent biography of Sherwood's life up to the time of his public service in 1940. Recommended for background reading are John Howard Lawson, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936; rev. ed. 1949); Winifred L. Dusenbury, The Theme of Loneliness inModern American Drama (1960); and Casper H. Nannes, Politics in the American Drama (1960).

Additional Sources

Brown, John Mason, The worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: mirror to his times, 1896-1939, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979, 1965.

For more information on Robert Emmet Sherwood, visit Britannica.com.

1896–1955, American dramatist, b. New Rochelle, N.Y., grad. Harvard, 1918. After serving in World War I, he wrote for Vanity Fair and Life, serving as editor of the latter from 1924 to 1928. His first play, the historical comedy The Road to Rome (1927), was an immediate success. It was followed by The Love Nest (1927), Waterloo Bridge (1930), and Reunion in Vienna (1931), a nostalgic comedy of the exiled Hapsburgs. His next plays—The Petrified Forest (1935), a melodrama set in the Arizona desert; Idiot's Delight (1936; Pulitzer Prize), an antiwar drama; and There Shall Be No Night (1940; Pulitzer Prize), about the Russian invasion of Finland—depict a civilization on the brink of disaster. Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938; Pulitzer Prize), one of his most notable efforts, concerns Lincoln's early years. During World War II, Sherwood was director of overseas operations in the Office of War Information and a speech writer for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the basis of the papers of Harry Hopkins he wrote a memoir, Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948; Pulitzer Prize), one of the most important documents on World War II. Sherwood also adapted Jacques Deval's comedy Tovarich (1936); wrote film scripts, including The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); and completed Philip Barry's last play, Second Threshold (1951).

Bibliography

See biographical studies by J. M. Brown (1965; ed. by N. Cousins, 1970), and W. J. Meserve (1970).

(1896-1955)

1927	The Road to Rome. Sherwood's first play is an antiwar drama set during the Punic Wars. The wife of Rome's leader seduces the invader Hannibal and convinces him to withdraw his armies. Sherwood's other 1927 play is a comedy based on Ring Lardner's The Love Nest. Sherwood had served on the Western Front and was gassed and wounded in both legs, experiences that shaped his opposition to future wars.
1930	Waterloo Bridge and This Is New York. The playwright manages only moderate success with this pair of dramas. The first is a melodrama concerning an English chorus girl who becomes a prostitute during World War I. The second is a comedy about a North Dakota senator's daughter who gets involved with a New York playboy. The play is a defense of New York written in reaction to the anti-New York sentiment provoked by Al Smith's presidential campaign.
1931	Reunion in Vienna. In Sherwood's comedy, an exiled Austrian prince reunites with a former lover; her husband hopes that the meeting will break the nobleman's spell over his wife.
1935	The Petrified Forest. In a play that captures the anomie of the time, inspired by Adolf Hitler's unchecked rise to power, Sherwood presents a world-weary idealist's encounter with the outlaw Duke Mantee and his gang at the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q in the Arizona desert. A moral and philosophical allegory, the play pits Mantee's amoral violence against an ineffectual romantic idealism. Both Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart would re-create their stage performances in the popular 1936 film version.
1936	Idiot's Delight. The playwright's Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy is set in an Italian hotel at the outbreak of the next European war as an American song-and-dance man encounters a former flame posing as a Russian countess. Hailed as Sherwood's "best written and best acted play," the drama entertainingly presents a strong pacifist and anti-Fascist message. Sherwood also writes Tovarich, an adaptation of the French comedy by Jacques Deval concerning Russian nobility forced to work as servants in Paris after the Russian Revolution. It becomes a smash hit on Broadway.
1938	Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Sherwood wins his second Pulitzer Prize for this biographical drama of Lincoln's pre-presidential years. It is the first production of the Playwrights' Company and features a highly praised interpretation of Lincoln by Raymond Massey.
1940	There Shall Be No Night. Sherwood's war drama deals with Russia's invasion of Finland. It wins the 1941 Pulitzer Prize, but in December 1941, when the United States becomes allied with Russia in the war against Germany, the playwright insists on closing it. He would restage it with a Greek setting, casting the Germans as villains.
1948	Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History. The dramatist who served as a speechwriter in the Roosevelt administration receives a Pulitzer Prize for this study of the relationship between FDR and his principal adviser, Harry Hopkins, in a behind-the-scenes look at the New Deal.

Quotes:

"All Coolidge had to do in 1924 was to keep his mean trap shut, to be elected. All Harding had to do in 1920 was repeat Avoid foreign entanglements. All Hoover had to do in 1928 was to endorse Coolidge. All Roosevelt had to do in 1932 was to point to Hoover."

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