S.N. Behrman

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Behrman, S[amuel] N[athaniel] (1893–1973), graduated from Harvard (1916), where he studied in the 47 Workshop, did graduate work at Columbia under Brander Matthews and St. John Ervine, and contributed to newspapers and magazines, winning his first success as a playwright with a comedy of manners, The Second Man (1927). Later plays, mainly in the same genre, include Serena Blandish (1929), adapted from a novel published anonymously but attributed to Enid Bagnold, about a naïve Mayfair society girl; Meteor (1929); Brief Moment (1931), about marital difficulties of a young patrician and a nightclub singer; Biography (1932), about a portrait painter and the celebrities she attracts; Rain from Heaven (1934); End of Summer (1936); Amphitryon 38 (1937), adapted from a French version of a Greek legend; No Time for Comedy (1939), about a playwright's attempt to do serious writing while tempted to continue with successful comedies; The Talley Method (1941), a surgeon's education in humanity; The Pirate (1942); Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), with Franz Werfel; Dunnigan's Daughter (1945); Fanny (1954), with Joshua Logan; Lord Pengo (1962); and But for Whom Charlie (1964). He also wrote motion‐picture scripts; a life of the art dealer Duveen (1952); The Worcester Account (1954), stories about his youth which he dramatized as The Cold Wind and the Warm (1958); Portrait of Max (1960), an intimate memoir of Max Beerbohm; The Suspended Drawing Room (1965), presenting profiles; The Burning Glass (1968), a novel about a young playwright; and People in a Diary (1972), a memoir.