Sherwood, Robert E(mmet)

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.