1.
Carl Van Vechten
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Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he was the youngest child of Charles and he graduated from Washington High School in 1898, and later the University of Chicago in 1903. In 1906, he moved to New York City and he was hired as the assistant music critic at The New York Times. His interest in opera had him take a leave of absence from the paper in 1907, while in England he married his long-time friend from Cedar Rapids, Anna Snyder. He returned to his job at the New York Times in 1909, at that time, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were performing in New York City. The marriage to Anna Snyder ended in divorce in 1912 and he wed actress Fania Marinoff in 1914 and their marriage lasted until the end of his life, even while his relationships with men were an open secret. They continued corresponding for the remainder of Steins life, and at her death she appointed Van Vechten her literary executor, several books of Van Vechtens essays on various subjects such as music and literature were published between 1915 and 1920. Van Vechtens controversial novel Nigger Heaven was published in 1926 and his essay Negro Blues Singers was published in Vanity Fair in 1926. Biographer Edward White suggests Van Vechten was convinced that Negro culture was the essence of America, by the start of the 1930s and at age 50, Van Vechten was finished with writing and took up photography, using his apartment at 150 West 55th Street as a studio. After the 1930s Van Vechten published little writing, though he continued writing letters to many correspondents, Van Vechten died in 1964, at the age of 84, in New York City. Most of Van Vechtens personal papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book, the Beinecke Library also holds a collection titled Living Portraits, Carl Van Vechtens Color Photographs Of African Americans, 1939–1964, a collection of 1,884 color Kodachrome slides. The Library of Congress has a collection of approximately 1,400 photographs, there is also a collection of Van Vechtens photographs in the Prentiss Taylor collection in the Smithsonians Archives of American Art, and a Van Vechten collection at Fisk University. The Museum of the City of New Yorks collection includes 2,174 of Carl Van Vechtens photographs, brandeis Universitys department of Archives & Special Collections holds 1,689 Carl Van Vechten portraits. Van Vechten also donated materials to Fisk University to form the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music, the album ’O, Write My Name’, American Portraits, Harlem Heroes was completed in 1983. That year, the National Endowment for the Arts transferred the Eakins Press Foundation’s prototype albums to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, dust Tracks on a Road, An Autobiography. Guide to the Carl Van Vechten papers, 1833–1965, manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library. Carl Van Vechten collection of papers, 1911–1964, berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library
2.
McKeesport, Pennsylvania
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McKeesport is a city in Allegheny County in the U. S. state of Pennsylvania, it is situated at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers and is part of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The population was 19,731 at the 2010 census, by population, it is Allegheny Countys second-largest city, after Pittsburgh. Settled in 1795 and named in honor of John McKee, its founder, large deposits of bituminous coal existed. McKeesport was incorporated as a borough in 1842 and as a city in 1891 and its population grew steadily until the mid-20th century, when it peaked in the 1940s. The citys population in 1900 was 34,227, in 1910,42,694, in 1920,45,975, the decrease in the population since the 1940s is attributable to the general economic malaise that descended upon the region when the steelmaking industry moved elsewhere. The major employer was the National Tube Works, a manufacturer of iron pipes, McKeesport was the site of the first G. C. Murphy five-and-ten-cent store. John McKee, a settler of Philadelphia and son of David McKee, built a log cabin near the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers. After taking over his fathers local river ferry business, he devised a plan for a city to be called McKees Port, John set out his proposal in the Pittsburgh Gazette, as part of a program under which new residents could purchase plots of land for $20.00. Around the time of the French and Indian Wars, George Washington often came to McKeesport to visit his friend, Queen Alliquippa, after being settled by the McKee family in 1795, McKeesport began to grow in 1830 when coal mining began. The first schoolhouse was built in 1832, with James E. Huey as its schoolmaster, the citys first steel mill was established in 1851. The National Tube Company opened in 1872 and became part of U. S. Steel, in the years directly following the opening of the National Tube Company, according to the U. S. Census Bureau, McKeesport was the fastest growing municipality in the nation. Families arrived from other parts of the eastern United States, Italy, Germany, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, McKeesport rose to national importance during the 1900s as a center for manufacturing steel. The citys population reached a peak of 55,355 in 1940 National Tube closed in the 1980s, the city with the help of regional development agencies has conducted efforts to revitalize the former mill sites. McKeesport is located at 40°20′38″N 79°50′56″W, McKeesport is about 12 miles upstream from Pittsburgh, at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of 5.4 square miles, of which 5.0 square miles is land and 0.4 square miles. The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers, according to the Köppen Climate Classification system, McKeesport has a humid continental climate, abbreviated Cfa on climate maps. The population has fallen to little more than a third of its wartime high, as of the census of 2000, there were 24,040 people,9,655 households, and 5,976 families residing in the city. The population density was 4,806.9 people per square mile, there were 11,124 housing units at an average density of 2,224.3 per square mile
3.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
4.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
5.
Madeline Hurlock
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Madeline Hurlock was a silent film actress, hailing from Federalsburg, Maryland. Hurlock appeared in short comedies for Mack Sennett, starting as one of the Sennett Bathing Beauties in 1923. She was a comedian, also known for her incredible beauty. She appeared in over 50 short films, the first of which, was made in 1923, and the last, Pink Pajamas, in 1929. She featured in one of Laurel and Hardys earliest films, Duck Soup, Hurlock married three times, John S. McGovern, divorced 1924. Marc Connelly, married 1930, divorced 1935, Connelly won the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Green Pastures in 1930. Sherwood won the Pulitzer Prize four times, he died in 1955
6.
Masterpiece
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Historically, a masterpiece was a work of a very high standard produced in order to obtain membership of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts. The word masterpiece probably derives from the Dutch meesterstuk or German meisterstück via loan translation, masterprize was another early variant in English. In English, the term became used in a variety of contexts for an exceptionally good piece of creative work. Originally, the term referred to a piece of work produced by an apprentice or journeyman aspiring to become a master craftsman in the old European guild system. His fitness to qualify for membership was judged partly by the masterpiece, and if he was successful. Great care was taken to produce a fine piece in whatever the craft was, whether confectionery, painting, goldsmithing, knifemaking. In the 17th century, the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, for instance, the workhouse had been set up as part of a tightening of standards after the company became concerned that the level of skill of goldsmithing was being diluted. The same goldsmithing organization still requires the production of a masterpiece, if they failed to be admitted, then they could continue to work for other goldsmiths but not as a master themselves. In some guilds, apprentices were not allowed to marry until they had obtained full membership, the practice of producing a masterpiece has continued in some modern academies of art, where the general term for such works is now reception piece. The Royal Academy in London uses the term work and it has acquired a fine collection of diploma works received as a condition of membership. Painting the Century,101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900–2000 Virtual Collection of Masterpieces Masterpieces at the Louvre
7.
The Green Pastures
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The Green Pastures is a play written in 1930 by Marc Connelly adapted from Ol Man Adam an His Chillun, a collection of stories written by Roark Bradford. The play was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930, the play portrays episodes from the Old Testament as seen through the eyes of a young African-American child in the Depression-era South, who interprets The Bible in terms familiar to her. Following Bradfords lead, Connelly set the stories in New Orleans. He diverged from Bradfords work, however, in enlarging the role of the character De Lawd, the Green Pastures also featured numerous African American spirituals arranged by Hall Johnson and performed by The Hall Johnson Choir. The cast also included singer Mabel Ridley, connolly later collaborated with William Keighley in the direction of a Hollywood film adaptation of the play, which was made in 1936, starring Rex Ingram as De Lawd. At the time the film caused some controversy and it was banned in Australia, Finland, and Hungary on the grounds that it was blasphemous to portray Biblical characters in this way. The play was adapted for television, and presented twice during the days of live TV on the Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1957 and 1959, both productions starred William Warfield as De Lawd, in the largest dramatic acting role he ever had on television. Ol Man Adam an His Chillun, New York, London, Harper & Brothers. Voices Offstage, A Book of Memoirs
8.
Tall Story
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Tall Story is a 1960 American romantic comedy film made by Warner Bros. directed by Joshua Logan and starring Anthony Perkins with Jane Fonda, in her first screen role, at the age of 22. Tall Story is a social satire of American campus life. Fonda portrays a character who is the complete opposite of the independent liberated woman she later personified, at Custer University, Ray Blent is an honor student and college basketball star. June Ryder has come to the university to study home economics, both students and faculty are scandalized by Ryders unashamed pursuit of Blent. She joins the girls and attends all the classes taken by Blent to ensure she has maximum contact with him. Everyone is aware of her designs on the sexually naive Blent and she succeeds in convincing him that she has an intelligent, inquiring mind that he admires, although this is all done through deception. She eventually gets Blent to fall for her and propose marriage, however, they need several thousand dollars to set up a home. Blent is secretly propositioned, via a message, by a gambling syndicate to lose a key game with a visiting Russian team. He refuses to do this, but is unable to return the money as he not know who is behind the bribe. Rather than deliberately throw the game, he decides to fail an ethics exam. He is the best student in class and the way he can fail is by copying Ryders paper. Too late he realizes that his not playing is tantamount to ensuring his team lose. Meanwhile, his ethics professor, Leo Sullivan, is coming under extreme student and faculty pressure to reverse the failure and he refuses to do this on principle, but finally consents to give Blent an oral retest while the game is in progress. Blent passes and plays for the last few minutes, achieving a one-point victory for the school and this was his last acting role in a Hollywood film. Cast member Tom Laughlin was all but absent from motion-picture screens after this until late in the decade, the films working title was The Way the Ball Bounces. Fonda had hated the Broadway play, but was pleased that her part in the script had been expanded. Logan was a friend of her father, Henry Fonda. Campus scenes were filmed at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles California, on its release in 1960, the film was neither a commercial nor a critical success
9.
George S. Kaufman
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George Simon Kaufman was an American playwright, theatre director and producer, humorist, and drama critic. In addition to comedies and political satire, he wrote several musicals, One play and one musical that he wrote won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, You Cant Take It with You, and Of Thee I Sing. He also won the Tony Award as a Director, for the musical Guys, Kaufman then began his career as a journalist and drama critic, he was the drama editor for The New York Times from 1917 through 1930. Kaufman took his editorial responsibilities very seriously, according to legend, on one occasion a press agent asked, How do I get our leading ladys name in the Times. He worked with Moss Hart in 1930 on the Broadway hit Once in a Lifetime and also with Hart, wrote You Cant Take it With You, Kaufmans Broadway debut was September 4,1918 at the Knickerbocker Theatre, with the premiere of the melodrama Someone in the House. He coauthored the play with Walter C, percival, based on a magazine story written by Larry Evans. The play opened on Broadway during that years serious flu epidemic, with dour glee, Kaufman suggested that the best way to avoid crowds in New York City was to attend his play. In every Broadway season from 1921 through 1958, there was a written or directed by Kaufman. Since Kaufmans death in 1961, there have been revivals of his work on Broadway in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 2000s, Kaufman wrote only one play alone, The Butter and Egg Man in 1925. Marquand he wrote an adaptation of Marquands novel The Late George Apley. According to his biography on PBS, he wrote some of the American theaters most enduring comedies with Moss Hart. Their work includes Once in a Lifetime, Merrily We Roll Along, The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Cant Take It with You, for a period, Kaufman lived at 158 West 58th Street in New York City. The building later would be the setting for Stage Door and it is now the Park Savoy Hotel and for many years was considered a single room occupancy hotel. Musical theatre Despite his claim that he knew nothing about music and hated it in the theatre, according to Charlotte Chandler, By the time Animal Crackers opened. The Marx Brothers were becoming famous enough to interest Hollywood, paramount signed them to a contract. Kaufman was one of the writers who excelled in writing intelligent nonsense for Groucho Marx, though the Marx Brothers were notoriously critical of their writers, Groucho and Harpo Marx expressed admiration and gratitude towards Kaufman. Dick Cavett, introducing Groucho onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1972, while The Cocoanuts was being developed in Atlantic City, Irving Berlin was hugely enthusiastic about a song he had written for the show. Kaufman was less enthusiastic, and refused to rework the libretto to include this number, the discarded song was Always, ultimately a huge hit for Berlin, recorded by many popular performers
10.
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
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The Pulitzer Prize for Drama is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes and it recognizes a theatrical work staged in the U. S. during the preceding calendar year. The drama jury, which consists of one academic and four critics, attends plays in New York, in 1955 Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Edward Albees Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf. was selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama by that awards committee. However, the selection was overruled by the awards advisory board. Had Albee been awarded, he would be tied with Eugene ONeill for the most Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, in its first 98 years to 2013, the Drama Pulitzer was awarded 82 times, none were given in 15 years and it was never split. Many of the prizes were won by people for their collaboration. * Star marks winners of the annual Tony Award for Best Play or Best Musical,1917, no award 1918, Why Marry. – Jesse Lynch Williams 1919, no award Nine musicals have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and they are, George and Ira Gershwins Of Thee I Sing, Rodgers and Hammersteins South Pacific, Bock & Harnicks Fiorello. Of Thee I Sing, Sunday in the Park with George, however, Of Thee I Sing opened when the Tony Awards did not exist, and Next to Normal won the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations. The award goes to the playwright, although production of the play is taken into account. In the case of a musical being awarded the prize, the composer, lyricist, the reason given was that the Pulitzer Prize for Drama is a dramatic award, and not a musical one. Additionally, since 1983, when the identity of finalists was first disclosed and they are, Lee Breuer and Bob Telsons The Gospel at Colonus, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes In the Heights, and Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Krons Fun Home. The latter two shows, however, each won the Tony Award for Best Musical, ¹All listed dates are Prize years. Generally, the musical in question opened in New York during either the preceding year or the preceding Broadway season. Eugene ONeill won the Pulitzer for Drama four times, three in the 1920s, several people have won two or three. Media related to Pulitzer Prize for Drama winners at Wikimedia Commons
11.
Play (theatre)
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A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. Plays are performed at a variety of levels, from Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional theater, to Community theatre, there are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference as to whether their plays were performed or read. The term play can refer to both the works of playwrights and to their complete theatrical performance. Comedies are plays which are designed to be humorous, comedies are often filled with witty remarks, unusual characters, and strange circumstances. Certain comedies are geared toward different age groups, comedies were one of the two original play types of Ancient Greece, along with tragedies. An example of a comedy would be William Shakespeares play A Midsummer Nights Dream, a generally nonsensical genre of play, farces are often overacted and often involve slapstick humor. An example of a farce includes William Shakespeares play The Comedy of Errors, a satire play takes a comic look at current events people while at the same time attempting to make a political or social statement, for example pointing out corruption. An example of a satire would be Nikolai Gogols The Government Inspector, satire plays are generally one of the most popular forms of comedy, and often considered to be their own genre entirely. This is a genre that explored relationships between men and women, and was considered risqué in its time, however, since restoration comedy dealt with unspoken aspects of relationships, it created a type of connection between audience and performance that was more informal and private. It is commonly agreed that restoration comedy has origins in Molière’s theories of comedy, the inconsistency between restoration comedy’s morals and the morals of the era is something that often arises during the study of this genre. This may give clues as to why, despite its original success, however, in recent years, it has become a topic of interest for theatre theorists, who have been looking into theatre styles that have their own conventions of performance. These plays contain darker themes such as death and disaster, often the protagonist of the play has a tragic flaw, a trait which leads to their downfall. Tragic plays convey all emotions and have extremely dramatic conflicts, tragedy was one of the two original play types of Ancient Greece. Some examples of tragedies include William Shakespeares Hamlet, and also John Websters play The Duchess of Malfi and these plays focus on actual historical events. They can be tragedies or comedies, but are neither of these. History as a genre was popularized by William Shakespeare. Examples of historical plays include Friedrich Schillers Demetrius and William Shakespeares King John, ballad opera, a popular theatre style at the time, was the first style of musical to be performed in the American colonies. The first musical of American origin was premiered in Philadelphia in 1767, and was called “The Disappointment”, however, around the 1920s, theatre styles were beginning to be defined more clearly
12.
Journalist
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A journalist is a person who collects, writes, or distributes news or other current information. A journalists work is called journalism, a journalist can work with general issues or specialize in certain issues. However, most journalists tend to specialize, and by cooperating with other journalists, for example, a sports journalist covers news within the world of sports, but this journalist may be a part of a newspaper that covers many different topics. A reporter is a type of journalist who researches, writes, and reports on information in order to present in sources, conduct interviews, engage in research, and make reports. The information-gathering part of a job is sometimes called reporting. Reporters may split their time working in a newsroom and going out to witness events or interviewing people. Reporters may be assigned a beat or area of coverage. Depending on the context, the term journalist may include various types of editors, editorial writers, columnists, Journalism has developed a variety of ethics and standards. While objectivity and a lack of bias are of concern and importance, more liberal types of journalism, such as advocacy journalism and activism. This has become prevalent with the advent of social media and blogs, as well as other platforms that are used to manipulate or sway social and political opinions. These platforms often project extreme bias, as sources are not always held accountable or considered necessary in order to produce a written, nor did they often directly experience most social problems, or have direct access to expert insights. These limitations were made worse by a media that tended to over-simplify issues and to reinforce stereotypes, partisan viewpoints. As a consequence, Lippmann believed that the public needed journalists like himself who could serve as analysts, guiding “citizens to a deeper understanding of what was really important. ”Journalists sometimes expose themselves to danger. Organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders publish reports on press freedom, as of November 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 887 journalists have been killed worldwide since 1992 by murder, crossfire or combat, or on dangerous assignment. The ten deadliest countries for journalists since 1992 have been Iraq, Philippines, Russia, Colombia, Mexico, Algeria, Pakistan, India, Somalia, Brazil and Sri Lanka. The Committee to Protect Journalists also reports that as of December 1st 2010,145 journalists were jailed worldwide for journalistic activities. The ten countries with the largest number of currently-imprisoned journalists are Turkey, China, Iran, Eritrea, Burma, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Cuba, Ethiopia, apart from the physical harm, journalists are harmed psychologically. This applies especially to war reporters, but their offices at home often do not know how to deal appropriately with the reporters they expose to danger
13.
Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph
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The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph was an evening daily newspaper published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1927 to 1960. Part of the Hearst newspaper chain, it competed with the Pittsburgh Press, the Sun-Telegraphs ancestry, which includes the Chronicle Telegraph and the earlier Chronicle, stretches back to the first half of the 19th century. The Morning Chronicle was established on June 26,1841 by Richard George Berford, at first a semi-weekly paper, it became a daily on September 8 of the same year. The original editor was 19-year-old J. Heron Foster, who would later be the editor of the Spirit of the Age. A weekly edition of the paper first appeared in November 1841 with the title The Iron City, on August 30,1851 the daily paper changed its time of issue, becoming the Evening Chronicle. On January 2,1884, the Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle merged with the Pittsburgh Telegraph to form the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph, in 1892, the Chronicle Telegraph Building on Fifth Avenue gained brief notoriety as the site where anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. In October 1900 the paper sponsored the Chronicle Telegraph Cup, a baseball series won by the Brooklyn Superbas over the Pittsburgh Pirates. Held only once, the contest was a precursor to the current World Series, the papers were soon housed under the same roof and frequently exchanged or shared staff members. In 1915 a new building on the current site of the U. S. Steel Tower became the home of the Chronicle Telegraph along with Olivers morning paper. Upon the death of George T. Oliver in 1919, control of the Chronicle Telegraph and Gazette Times passed to his sons George S. on August 1,1927, William Randolph Hearst completed a purchase of the two Oliver papers, including the building. He coordinated the transaction with publisher Paul Block, who at the time became owner of another morning-evening combination, the Pittsburgh Post and its 1906 offshoot. The first issues of the new publications rolled off the presses the next day, the deal stipulated that the Sun-Telegraph, but not the Post-Gazette, would publish on Sundays, even though the latter papers predecessors had Sunday editions and the formers did not. The combined Sunday circulation that the Post-Gazette would have inherited was instead transferred to the Sunday Sun-Telegraph, in the 1950s the Sun-Telly was losing subscribers and advertisers to its direct competitor in the evening and Sunday fields, the Pittsburgh Press, and to a lesser degree the Post-Gazette. In 1960 the Hearst organization sold the paper along with its building to the Post-Gazette. These problems helped spur the Post-Gazette to enter into a joint operating agreement with the stronger Press in the following year, in 1978 the barely noticeable subtitle finally disappeared from the nameplate. Pittsburghs Post-Gazette, The First Newspaper West of the Alleghenies, thomas, Clarke M. Front-Page Pittsburgh, Two Hundred Years of the Post-Gazette
14.
Comedies
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In a modern sense, comedy refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, and stand-up comedy. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece, in the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a Society of Youth and a Society of the Old, a revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. Satire and political satire use comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, parody subverts popular genres and forms, critiquing those forms without necessarily condemning them. Similarly scatological humour, sexual humour, and race humour create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comic ways, a comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society and uses humor to parody or satirize the behaviour and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms. The adjective comic, which means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage. Of this, the word came into usage through the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time. The Greeks and Romans confined their use of the comedy to descriptions of stage-plays with happy endings. Aristotle defined comedy as an imitation of men worse than the average, however, the characters portrayed in comedies were not worse than average in every way, only insofar as they are Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others, the mask, for instance, in the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings. It is in this sense that Dante used the term in the title of his poem, as time progressed, the word came more and more to be associated with any sort of performance intended to cause laughter. During the Middle Ages, the comedy became synonymous with satire. They disassociated comedy from Greek dramatic representation and instead identified it with Arabic poetic themes and forms and they viewed comedy as simply the art of reprehension, and made no reference to light and cheerful events, or to the troubling beginnings and happy endings associated with classical Greek comedy. After the Latin translations of the 12th century, the term gained a more general meaning in medieval literature. Starting from 425 BCE, Aristophanes, a playwright and satirical author of the Ancient Greek Theater wrote 40 comedies,11 of which survive. Aristophanes developed his type of comedy from the satyr plays
15.
Beggar on Horseback
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Beggar on Horseback is a play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. A parody of the expressionistic parables that were popular at the time, the play rails against the perils of trading ones artistic talents for commercial gain. At its core is Neil McRae, a poor, young classical composer, unfortunately, the man also favors the Tin Pan Alley school of musical composition, against which McRae is staunchly opposed. Conflict arises when he is offered a job making widgets at a salary if he agrees to give up his foolish interest in the classics. The original Broadway production opened on February 12,1924 at the Broadhurst Theatre, the cast included Roland Young, Osgood Perkins, Spring Byington, and Frederic Richard Sullivan. The play was revived with most of the original cast a mere 7 months later, opening on March 23,1925 at the Shubert Theatre, where it ran for 16 performances. Forty-five years later, after 13 previews, another opened on May 14,1970 at Lincoln Centers Vivian Beaumont Theater. The cast included Leonard Frey and Susan Watson, on August 24,1925, Paramount Pictures released a silent film version directed by James Cruze and starring Edward Everett Horton. Only three reels of this film exist. Beggar on Horseback at Internet Broadway Database
16.
Old Testament
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Its counterpart is the New Testament, the second part of the Christian Bible. The books that comprise the Old Testament canon differ between Christian Churches as well as their order and names. The most common Protestant canon comprises 39 books, the Catholic canon comprises 46 books, the 39 books in common to all the Christian canons corresponds to 24 books of the Tanakh, with some differences of order, and there are some differences in text. The additional number reflects the split of texts in the Christian Bibles into separate books, for example, Kings, Samuel and Chronicles, Ezra–Nehemiah, the books which are part of a Christian Old Testament but which are not part of the Hebrew canon are sometimes described as deuterocanonical. In general, Protestant bibles do not include books in its canon. The Old Testament consists of translations of many books by various authors produced over a period of centuries. The canon formed in stages, first the Pentateuch by around 400 BC, then the Prophets during the Hasmonean dynasty, and finally the remaining books. The Old Testament contains 39 or 46 or more books, divided, very broadly, into the Pentateuch, the books, the wisdom books. For the Orthodox canon, Septuagint titles are provided in parentheses when these differ from those editions, for the Catholic canon, the Douaic titles are provided in parentheses when these differ from those editions. Likewise, the King James Version references some of these books by the spelling when referring to them in the New Testament. The Talmud in Bava Batra 14b gives a different order for the books in Neviim and Ketuvim and this order is also cited in Mishneh Torah Hilchot Sefer Torah 7,15. The order of the books of the Torah is universal through all denominations of Judaism and they are present in a few historic Protestant versions, the German Luther Bible included such books, as did the English 1611 King James Version. Empty table cells indicate that a book is absent from that canon, several of the books in the Eastern Orthodox canon are also found in the appendix to the Latin Vulgate, formerly the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings follow, there is a broad consensus among scholars that these originated as a single work during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BC. The two Books of Chronicles cover much the material as the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic history and probably date from the 4th century BC. Chronicles, and Ezra–Nehemiah, were finished during the 3rd century BC. Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments contain two to four Books of Maccabees, written in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC and these history books make up around half the total content of the Old Testament. God is consistently depicted as the one who created or put into order the world, the Old Testament stresses the special relationship between God and his chosen people, Israel, but includes instructions for proselytes as well
17.
Drama
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Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning action, which is derived from I do, the two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. They are symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia, Thalia was the Muse of comedy, while Melpomene was the Muse of tragedy. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the mode has been contrasted with the epic. The use of drama in a narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the modern era. Drama in this sense refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example and it is this narrower sense that the film and television industries, along with film studies, adopted to describe drama as a genre within their respective media. Radio drama has been used in both senses—originally transmitted in a performance, it has also been used to describe the more high-brow. The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production, the structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception. The early modern tragedy Hamlet by Shakespeare and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles are among the masterpieces of the art of drama, a modern example is Long Days Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. Closet drama describes a form that is intended to be read, in improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance, performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience. Western drama originates in classical Greece, the theatrical culture of the city-state of Athens produced three genres of drama, tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. Their origins remain obscure, though by the 5th century BCE they were institutionalised in competitions held as part of celebrating the god Dionysus. The competition for tragedies may have begun as early as 534 BCE, tragic dramatists were required to present a tetralogy of plays, which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. Comedy was officially recognized with a prize in the competition from 487 to 486 BCE, five comic dramatists competed at the City Dionysia, each offering a single comedy. Ancient Greek comedy is traditionally divided between old comedy, middle comedy and new comedy, following the expansion of the Roman Republic into several Greek territories between 270–240 BCE, Rome encountered Greek drama. While Greek drama continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, from the beginning of the empire, however, interest in full-length drama declined in favour of a broader variety of theatrical entertainments. The first important works of Roman literature were the tragedies and comedies that Livius Andronicus wrote from 240 BCE, five years later, Gnaeus Naevius also began to write drama. No plays from either writer have survived, by the beginning of the 2nd century BCE, drama was firmly established in Rome and a guild of writers had been formed
18.
Broadway theatre
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Along with Londons West End theatres, Broadway theatres are widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. The Theater District is a popular tourist attraction in New York City, the great majority of Broadway shows are musicals. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggars Opera, in 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice, the company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, by the 1840s, P. T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan. In 1829, at Broadway and Prince Street, Niblos Garden opened, the 3, 000-seat theatre presented all sorts of musical and non-musical entertainments. In 1844, Palmos Opera House opened and presented opera for four seasons before bankruptcy led to its rebranding as a venue for plays under the name Burtons Theatre. The Astor Opera House opened in 1847, booth played the role for a famous 100 consecutive performances at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1865, and would later revive the role at his own Booths Theatre. Other renowned Shakespeareans who appeared in New York in this era were Henry Irving, Tommaso Salvini, Fanny Davenport, lydia Thompson came to America in 1868 heading a small theatrical troupe, adapting popular English burlesques for middle-class New York audiences. Thompsons troupe called the British Blondes, was the most popular entertainment in New York during the 1868–1869 theatrical season, the six-month tour ran for almost six extremely profitable years. Theatre in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown beginning around 1850, in 1870, the heart of Broadway was in Union Square, and by the end of the century, many theatres were near Madison Square. Broadways first long-run musical was a 50-performance hit called The Elves in 1857, New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keenes musical burletta The Seven Sisters shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances. It was at a performance by Keenes troupe of Our American Cousin in Washington, the production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a musical comedy, Tony Pastor opened the first vaudeville theatre one block east of Union Square in 1881, where Lillian Russell performed. Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 and 1890, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by his father-in-law David Braham. They starred high quality singers, instead of the women of repute who had starred in earlier musical forms. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits, as in England, during the latter half of the century, the theatre began to be cleaned up, with less prostitution hindering the attendance of the theatre by women
19.
Life (magazine)
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Life was an American magazine that ran weekly from 1883 to 1936 as a humor magazine with limited circulation. Time owner Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936, solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name, Life was published weekly until 1972, as an intermittent special until 1978, and as a monthly from 1978 to 2000. After 2000 Time Inc. continued to use the Life brand for special, Life returned to regularly scheduled issues when it became a weekly newspaper supplement from 2004 to 2007. The website life. com, originally one of the channels on Time Inc. s Pathfinder service, was for a time in the late 2000s managed as a joint venture with Getty Images under the name See Your World, LLC. On January 30,2012 the LIFE. com URL became a channel on Time. com. When Life was founded in 1883, it was developed as similar to the British magazine and it was published for 53 years as a general-interest light entertainment magazine, heavy on illustrations, jokes and social commentary. The Luce Life was the first all-photographic American news magazine, the magazines role in the history of photojournalism is considered its most important contribution to publishing. Life was wildly successful for two generations before its prestige was diminished by economics and changing tastes, Life was founded January 4,1883, in a New York City artists studio at 1155 Broadway, as a partnership between John Ames Mitchell and Andrew Miller. Mitchell held a 75 per cent interest in the magazine with the remainder by Miller, both men retained their holdings until their deaths. Miller served as secretary-treasurer of the magazine and was very successful managing the side of the operation. Mitchell, a 37-year-old illustrator who used a $10,000 inheritance to invest in the weekly magazine, Mitchell created the first Life name-plate with cupids as mascots, he later drew its masthead of a knight leveling his lance at the posterior of a fleeing devil. Mitchell took advantage of a new printing process using zinc-coated plates. This edge helped because Life faced stiff competition from the humor magazines Judge and Puck. Edward Sandford Martin was brought on as Lifes first literary editor, the motto of the first issue of Life was, While theres Life, theres hope. The new magazine set forth its principles and policies to its readers and we shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world. The magazine was a success and soon attracted the leading contributors. Among the most important was Charles Dana Gibson, three years after the magazine was founded, the Massachusetts native first sold Life a drawing for $4, a dog outside his kennel howling at the moon. Encouraged by a publisher who was also an artist, Gibson was joined in Life early days by such illustrators as Palmer Cox
20.
Magazine
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A magazine is a publication, usually a periodical publication, which is printed or electronically published. Magazines are generally published on a schedule and contain a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, by a price, by prepaid subscriptions. At its root, the magazine refers to a collection or storage location. In the case of written publication, it is a collection of written articles and this explains why magazine publications share the word root with gunpowder magazines, artillery magazines, firearms magazines, and, in French, retail stores such as department stores. By definition, a magazine paginates with each issue starting at three, with the standard sizing being 8 3/8 ×10 7/8 inches. However, in the sense a journal has continuous pagination throughout a volume. Some professional or trade publications are also peer-reviewed, an example being the Journal of Accountancy, academic or professional publications that are not peer-reviewed are generally professional magazines. That a publication calls itself a journal does not make it a journal in the technical sense, magazines can be distributed through the mail, through sales by newsstands, bookstores, or other vendors, or through free distribution at selected pick-up locations. The subscription business models for distribution fall into three main categories. In this model, the magazine is sold to readers for a price, either on a basis or by subscription. Paid circulation allows for defined readership statistics and this means that there is no cover price and issues are given away, for example in street dispensers, airline, or included with other products or publications. Because this model involves giving issues away to unspecific populations, the statistics only entail the number of issues distributed and this is the model used by many trade magazines distributed only to qualifying readers, often for free and determined by some form of survey. This allows a level of certainty that advertisements will be received by the advertisers target audience. This latter model was used before the rise of the World Wide Web and is still employed by some titles. For example, in the United Kingdom, a number of computer-industry magazines use this model, including Computer Weekly and Computing, for the global media industry, an example would be VideoAge International. The earliest example of magazines was Erbauliche Monaths Unterredungen, a literary and philosophy magazine, the Gentlemans Magazine, first published in 1731, in London was the first general-interest magazine. Edward Cave, who edited The Gentlemans Magazine under the pen name Sylvanus Urban, was the first to use the term magazine, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842, The Illustrated London News was the first illustrated magazine
21.
The Spirit of St. Louis (film)
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The Spirit of St. Louis is a 1957 biographical film in CinemaScope from Warner Bros. directed by Billy Wilder, that stars James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh. The screenplay was adapted by Charles Lederer, Wendell Mayes, and Billy Wilder from Lindberghs 1953 autobiographical account of his historic flight and his take off begins at Roosevelt Field and ends 33-hours later on May 21,1927 when he lands safely at Le Bourget Field in Paris. The film ends with newsreel footage of Lindberghs ticker tape parade in New York. On May 19,1927, after waiting for a week for the rain to stop, slim Lindbergh tries to rest in a hotel near Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, prior to a transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. His friend Frank Mahoney guards his hotel room door from reporters, unable to sleep, Lindbergh reminisces about his time as an airmail pilot. Flying to Chicago in winter, Lindbergh lands his old de Havilland biplane in an airfield to refuel. Despite the bad weather, he takes off, unaware the Chicago landing field has closed due to snow, after running out of fuel, Lindbergh bails out. From a diner, Lindbergh calls Columbia Aircraft Corporation in New York, quoted the price of $15,000 for a Bellanca aircraft, Lindbergh lobbies St. Louis financiers, with a plan to fly 40 hours in a stripped-down, single-engine aircraft. Excited by his vision, the backers dub it Spirit of St. Louis, the Bellanca deal falls apart when the company demands their own pilot will fly the aircraft. Lindbergh then approaches Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego, California, Mahoney, the president of the company, promises to build him an aircraft in just 90 days. With Ryans chief engineer Donald Hall, a design is begun, to decrease weight, Lindbergh refuses to install radios or heavy equipment, even a parachute, and plans to navigate by dead reckoning. Workers at the factory agree to work 24-hour shifts to complete the aircraft on time, Lindbergh flies his new aircraft to St. Louis, and on to New York. Unable to sleep, he prepares his aircraft at Roosevelt Field, in the cramped cockpit, the magnetic compass was positioned above his head but a young woman offers her compact mirror. Lindbergh fixes it to the instrument panel with chewing gum so he can see the compass, furtively, Mahoney slips a Saint Christopher medal into the pilots lunch bag. With the weather clearing, theSpirit of St. Louis trundles down the muddy runway, every hour, Lindbergh switches fuel tanks to keep the weight load balanced. As he flies over Cape Cod, he realizes he has not slept in 28 hours and he recalls sleeping on railroad tracks, on short bunk beds, and under a windmill. When Lindbergh begins to doze, he is awakened by a fly, over Nova Scotia, he sees a motorcyclist below, remembering his own Harley Davidson motorcycle traded as partial payment for his first aircraft, a war-surplus Curtiss Jenny. Over the seemingly endless Atlantic, Lindbergh remembers barnstorming across the Midwest in a flying circus, after 18 hours, the aircrafts wings ice up and the Spirit of St. Louis begins to drop, but the ice breaks off in the warmer air and the engine restarted
22.
James Stewart
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James Maitland Stewart, also known as Jimmy Stewart, was an American actor and military officer who is among the most honored and popular stars in film history. A major Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player, Stewart was known for his distinctive drawl and down-to-earth persona, many of the films he starred in have become enduring classics. Stewart was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition for The Philadelphia Story, in 1999, Stewart was named the third greatest male screen legend of the Golden Age of Hollywood by the American Film Institute, behind Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant. The American Film Institute has also named five of Stewarts films to its list of the 100 best American films ever made. Stewart was born on May 20,1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth Jackson and Alexander Maitland Stewart, Stewart was mainly of Scottish ancestry and was raised as a Presbyterian. He was descended from veterans of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the eldest of three children, he was expected to continue his fathers business, which had been in the family for three generations. His mother was an excellent pianist but his father discouraged Stewarts request for lessons, when his father accepted a gift of an accordion from a guest, young Stewart quickly learned to play the instrument, which became a fixture offstage during his acting career. As the family grew, music continued to be an important part of family life, Stewart attended Mercersburg Academy prep school, graduating in 1928. He was active in a variety of activities and he played on the football and track teams, was art editor of the KARUX yearbook, and a member of the choir club, glee club, and John Marshall Literary Society. Over the following two summers, he took a job as an assistant with a professional magician and he made his first appearance onstage at Mercersburg, as Buquet in the play The Wolves. A shy child, Stewart spent much of his time in the basement working on model airplanes, mechanical drawing. However, he abandoned visions of being a pilot when his father insisted that instead of the United States Naval Academy he attend Princeton University, Stewart enrolled at Princeton in 1928 as a member of the class of 1932. His acting and accordion talents at Princeton led him to be invited to the University Players, the company had been organized in 1928 and would run until 1932, with Joshua Logan, Bretaigne Windust and Charles Leatherbee as directors. Stewart performed in bit parts in the Players productions in Cape Cod during the summer of 1932, the troupe had previously included Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. Stewart and Fonda became close friends over the summer of 1932 when they shared an apartment with Joshua Logan, the New Yorker commented, Mr. James Stewarts chauffeur. Comes on for three minutes and walks off to a round of spontaneous applause, the play was a moderate success, but times were hard. Many Broadway theaters had been converted to houses and the Depression was reaching bottom. From 1932 through 1934, Stewart later recalled, Id only worked three months, every play I got into folded
23.
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
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Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is a 1994 American film scripted by screenwriter/director Alan Rudolph and former Washington Star reporter Randy Sue Coburn. The film was an Official Selection at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme dOr, the film was a critical but not a commercial success. Peter Benchley, who played editor Frank Crowninshield, was the grandson of Robert Benchley, actor Wallace Shawn was the son of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker. After making The Moderns, a film about American expatriates in 1920s Paris and he began work on a screenplay with novelist and former Washington Star journalist Randy Sue Coburn about legendary writer Dorothy Parker. In 1992, Rudolph attended a Fourth of July party hosted by filmmaker Robert Altman who introduced him to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rudolph was surprised by her physical resemblance to Parker and was impressed by her knowledge of the Jazz Age. Leigh was so committed to doing the film that she agreed to make it for a tenth of what I normally get for a film, the screenplay originally focused on the platonic relationship between Parker and Robert Benchley, but this did not appeal to any financial backers. There still was no interest even when Altman came on board as producer, the emphasis on Parker was the next change to the script, but Rudolph still had no luck finding financing for a period biography of a literate woman. Altman claimed that he forced the film to be made by putting his own money into it, Rudolph shot the film in Montreal because the building facades in its old city most closely resembled period New York City. Full financing was not acquired until four weeks into principal photography, the films large cast followed Leighs lead and agreed to work for much lower than their usual salaries. Rudolph invited them to write their own dialogue, which resulted in a chaotic first couple of days of principal photography, actor Campbell Scott remembered, Everyone hung on to what they knew about their characters and just sort of threw it out there. As such, many of the actors had much larger parts that were edited down to nearly nothing, the cast trusted their director during the 40-day shoot. They stayed in a run-down hotel dubbed Camp Rudolph and engaged in poker games. Leigh chose not to participate in activities, preferring to stay in character on. She did a great amount of research for the role and said, to this end, Leigh stayed for a week at the Algonquin Hotel and read Parkers entire body of work. In addition, the actress listened repeatedly to the two existing audio recordings of Parker in order to perfect the writers distinctive voice, Leigh found that Parker had a sensibility that I understand very, very well. A rough cut of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle was screened at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival where it divided film critics and it was rumored afterwards that Leigh re-recorded several scenes that were too difficult to understand because of her accent but she denied that this happened. The film was an Official Selection at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme dOr, the film currently holds a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 31 reviews. For her performance in the film, Jennifer Jason Leigh was nominated for both the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead
24.
Internet Archive
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The Internet Archive is a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of universal access to all knowledge. As of October 2016, its collection topped 15 petabytes, in addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains over 150 billion web captures, the Archive also oversees one of the worlds largest book digitization projects. Founded by Brewster Kahle in May 1996, the Archive is a 501 nonprofit operating in the United States. It has a budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources, revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, where about 30 of its 200 employees work, Most of its staff work in its book-scanning centers. The Archive has data centers in three Californian cities, San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond, the Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and was officially designated as a library by the State of California in 2007. Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in 1996 at around the time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. In October 1996, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large quantities, the archived content wasnt available to the general public until 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the Web archive, Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of projects, the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It. According to its web site, Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture, without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form, the Archives mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for over 1.3 million existing files, on November 6,2013, the Internet Archives headquarters in San Franciscos Richmond District caught fire, destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments. The nonprofit Archive sought donations to cover the estimated $600,000 in damage, in November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the archive to be based somewhere in the country of Canada. The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build an archive in a foreign country was because of the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump. Kahle was quoted as saying that on November 9th in America and it was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and it means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions
25.
Internet Broadway Database
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The Internet Broadway Database is an online database of Broadway theatre productions and their personnel. It was conceived and created by Karen Hauser in 1996 and is operated by the Research Department of The Broadway League, the website also has a corresponding app for both the IOS and Android. This comprehensive history of Broadway provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre in the 18th century up to today, details include cast and creative lists for opening night and current day, song lists, awards and other interesting facts about every Broadway production. Other features of IBDB include an archive of photos from past and present Broadway productions, headshots, links to cast recordings on iTunes or Amazon, gross. Its mission was to be an interactive, user-friendly, searchable database for League members, journalists, researchers, the League recently added Broadway Touring shows to the database for ease of tracking shows that play in theatres across the country. It is managed by Karen Hauser, Michael Abourizk, and Mark Smith of the Broadway League, Internet Theatre Database – ITDb Internet Movie Database – IMDb Internet Book Database – IBookDb Lortel Archives – IOBDb The Broadway League Official website Broadway League website
26.
IMDb
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In 1998 it became a subsidiary of Amazon Inc, who were then able to use it as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes. As of January 2017, IMDb has approximately 4.1 million titles and 7.7 million personalities in its database, the site enables registered users to submit new material and edits to existing entries. Although all data is checked before going live, the system has open to abuse. The site also featured message boards which stimulate regular debates and dialogue among authenticated users, IMDb shutdown the message boards permanently on February 20,2017. Anyone with a connection can read the movie and talent pages of IMDb. A registration process is however, to contribute info to the site. A registered user chooses a name for themselves, and is given a profile page. These badges range from total contributions made, to independent categories such as photos, trivia, bios, if a registered user or visitor happens to be in the entertainment industry, and has an IMDb page, that user/visitor can add photos to that page by enrolling in IMDbPRO. Actors, crew, and industry executives can post their own resume and this fee enrolls them in a membership called IMDbPro. PRO can be accessed by anyone willing to pay the fee, which is $19.99 USD per month, or if paid annually, $149.99, which comes to approximately $12.50 per month USD. Membership enables a user to access the rank order of each industry personality, as well as agent contact information for any actor, producer, director etc. that has an IMDb page. Enrolling in PRO for industry personnel, enables those members the ability to upload a head shot to open their page, as well as the ability to upload hundreds of photos to accompany their page. Anyone can register as a user, and contribute to the site as well as enjoy its content, however those users enrolled in PRO have greater access and privileges. IMDb originated with a Usenet posting by British film fan and computer programmer Col Needham entitled Those Eyes, others with similar interests soon responded with additions or different lists of their own. Needham subsequently started an Actors List, while Dave Knight began a Directors List, and Andy Krieg took over THE LIST from Hank Driskill, which would later be renamed the Actress List. Both lists had been restricted to people who were alive and working, the goal of the participants now was to make the lists as inclusive as possible. By late 1990, the lists included almost 10,000 movies and television series correlated with actors and actresses appearing therein. On October 17,1990, Needham developed and posted a collection of Unix shell scripts which could be used to search the four lists, at the time, it was known as the rec. arts. movies movie database
27.
Eugene O'Neill
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Eugene Gladstone ONeill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. ONeills plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular and they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known, nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism. ONeill was born in a hotel, the Barrett House, at Broadway and 43rd Street, a commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957. The site is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which offices, retail. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James ONeill and Mary Ellen Quinlan and his father suffered from alcoholism, his mother from an addiction to morphine, prescribed to relieve the pains of the difficult birth of her third son, Eugene. ONeill spent his summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London and he attended Princeton University for one year. Accounts vary as to why he left, ONeill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression and alcoholism. Despite this, he had a love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays. ONeill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, ONeills parents and elder brother Jamie died within three years of one another, not long after he had begun to make his mark in the theater. After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, ONeill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. In the fall of 1914, he entered Harvard University to attend a course in dramatic technique given by Professor George Baker and he left after one year and did not complete the course. During the 1910s ONeill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, ONeill also had a brief romantic relationship with Reeds wife, writer Louise Bryant. ONeill was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds and his involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. ONeill is said to have arrived for the summer in Provincetown with a full of plays. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished, the Provincetown Players performed many of ONeills early works in their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays began downtown and then moved to Broadway, ONeills first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and his best-known plays include Anna Christie, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, and his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness
28.
Zona Gale
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Zona Gale was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921, Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin, which she often used as a setting in her writing. After college, Gale wrote for newspapers in Milwaukee and New York City, a visit to Portage in 1903 proved a turning point in her literary life, as seeing the sights and sounds of town life led her to comment that her old world was full of new possibilities. Gale had found the material she needed for her writing, and she wrote and published there until her 1938 death, but made trips to New York. She published her first novel, Romance Island, in 1906, in 1920, she published the novel Miss Lulu Bett, which depicts life in the Midwestern United States. She adapted it as a play, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921, in addition to her fiction writing, Gale was an active supporter of the La Follettes and progressive causes. She was an member of the National Womens Party. In the same year, she attended the meeting of the Lucy Stone League. Her activism on behalf of women was her way to solve a problem she returned to repeatedly in her novels. In 1928 at the age of fifty-four she married William L. Breese, Zona Gale, who was a frequent visitor to the Mission Inn Hotel in Riverside, California, became a close friend of Frank Augustus Miller, the founder of the hotel. After Frank Miller died in 1935 Zona Gale wrote a biography entitled Frank Miller of Mission inn, a group of rooms on the fourth floor of The Mission Inn became known as authors row and the Zona Gale room is room 409. Gale died of pneumonia in a Chicago hospital in 1938, the house she built for her parents in Portage, now known as the Zona Gale House, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. American Women Writers, 1900-1945, A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, still Small Voice, The Biography of Zona Gale. Writers of Conviction, The Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, columbia, University of Missouri Press,2004. Not in Sisterhood, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship
29.
Owen Davis
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Owen Gould Davis, Sr. was an American dramatist. He received the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1923 play Icebound, before the First World War, he also wrote racy sketches of New York high jinks and low life for the Police Gazette under the name of Ike Swift. Many of these were set in the Tenderloin, Manhattan, Davis also wrote under several other pseudonyms, including Martin Hurley, Arthur J. Lamb, Walter Lawrence, John Oliver, and Robert Wayne. Davis was born in Portland, Maine and lived in Bangor until he was fifteen and he was the father of actor Owen, Jr. and playwright Donald. His brother Wilsterliam Hammatt Davis was Chairman of the National War Labor Board in Franklin Roosevelts administration, Davis died in New York City. As a boy, Owen Davis wrote plays for his eight brothers and sisters, deMille The Nervous Wreck, play, later made into the 1926 motion picture of the same name, and the 1944 motion picture Up in Arms, later produced as a musical, Whoopee. Staged on Broadway in 1928 and 1979 and made into the 1930 Whoopee. and Mrs. Donald Davis Is Dead, Playwright Was 88
30.
Hatcher Hughes
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Hatcher Hughes was an American playwright who lived in Grover, NC, as featured in the book Images of America. He was on the staff of Columbia University from 1912 onward. He was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for his 1922 play Hell-Bent Fer Heaven and he was the tenth of eleven children of Andrew Jackson Hughes and Martha Jane Gold Hughes. He received both his undergraduate degree and masters degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hell-bent fer Heaven was performed 122 times at the Klaw Theater. The play starred multiple Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner George Abbott and it was made into a movie in 1926. Other noted authors of plays and friends at the Klaw stage during Hughess time were George Bernard Shaw, Hughes was a professor at Columbia University. A UNC graduate, he returned often to NC to speak, in 1930 he married Janet Ranney Cool. The marriage produced a daughter, Ann Ranney Hughes, during the First World War, he served as an Army captain. He and his family divided their time between their home in New York City and their farm in West Cornwall, Connecticut, a Marriage Made in Heaven Wake Up, Jonathan
31.
Sidney Howard
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Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind, Sidney Howard was born in Oakland, California, the son of Helen Louise and John Lawrence Howard. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1915, along with other students of Harvard professor A. Piatt Andrew, Howard volunteered with Andrews American Field Service, serving in France and the Balkans during World War I. After the war, Howard made use of his proficiency at foreign languages and translated a number of works from French, Spanish, Hungarian. In 1921, Howards first play was produced on Broadway, a neo-romantic verse drama set in the time of Dante, Swords, did not do well with audiences or critics. It was with his realistic romance They Knew What They Wanted three years later that Howard established his reputation as a serious writer, theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it a tender, original, merciful drama. They Knew What They Wanted won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was adapted three times into film and later became the Broadway musical, The Most Happy Fella, Howards career was anything but consistent. For every successful play he wrote, he saw several others close without making any money and his saving grace was that he was a remarkably prolific writer. Lucky Sam McCarver, his play, was an unsentimental account of the marriage of a New York speakeasy owner on his way up in the world with a self-destructive socialite on her way down. It failed to attract audiences, though it won the admiration of some reviewers, with The Silver Cord, Howard had a major hit. It was a story for a decade fascinated by talk of Freud, Oedipal complexes, the Silver Cord is also the only original play by Howard to outlive its era. The play was staged by regional theater companies through the late twentieth century. The 1933 film of the play starred Irene Dunne and Joel McCrea, by 1930, Howard was one of the most dashing figures on the Broadway scene. In 1922, Howard married actress Clare Eames, who had played the lead in Swords. She later starred in Howards Lucky Sam McCarver and Ned McCobbs Daughter on Broadway, Howard and Eames had one child, a daughter, Jennifer Howard. The couple separated in 1927, and Howards anger at the disintegration of his marriage is reflected in his satire of modern matrimony. Following the unexpected death of Eames in 1930, Howard in 1931 married Leopoldine Damrosch, daughter of the conductor Walter Johannes Damrosch, with whom he had three children. A particular admirer of the realism of French playwright Charles Vildrac
32.
Paul Green (playwright)
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Paul Eliot Green was an American playwright best known for his depictions of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play and it was also included in Burns Mantles The Best Plays of 1926-1927. Born in Buies Creek, North Carolina, in Harnett County near Lillington and he went on to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he joined The Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies and the Carolina Playmakers. Green also studied at Cornell University, Green first attracted attention with his 1925 one-act play The No Count Boy which was produced by the New York Theatre Club. The next year his full-length play In Abrahams Bosom was produced by the Provincetown Players, the play was considered remarkable for its depiction of African Americans in the South. Its hero, a man of mixed ancestry, finds his idealistic attempts to better the lives of the African Americans around him doomed to failure. With this success, Green quickly was recognized as one of the leading voices in the American theatre. His plays were often compared with the plays of Irish playwright John Millington Synge. This included his 1926 play, The Last of the Lowries, greens tragedy of the decline of an old Southern family, The House of Connelly was chosen by the newly formed Group Theatre for its inaugural production. But Green had already begun to move away from the style of his early work. In 1928–29 he traveled to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship and was impressed by the productions that he saw there. He began to experiment with expressionism and the Epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht, in the 1930s Green largely abandoned the New York theatre, whose commercialism he found distasteful. His experiments in non-realistic drama, Tread the Green Grass and Shroud My Body Down both premiered in Chapel Hill, and never were produced in New York. Green returned to the Group Theatre to write his pacifist musical play, Johnny Johnson, in it, Green experimented with genre, writing the first act as a comedy, the second as a tragedy, and the third as a satire. It was also during this time that Lotte Lenya had her first American love affair with Green, reviews ranged from the enthusiastic to the dismissive, and it ran for sixty-eight performances. Green created a new form that he called symphonic drama. Inspired by historical events, it incorporated music and pageantry, usually for outdoor performance and his first experiment in this form was Roll Sweet Chariot, which ran for a scant four performances on Broadway. The Lost Colony is the oldest outdoor historical drama in the United States, the little one-room house where he did much of his writing can be seen at the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
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Elmer Rice
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Elmer Rice was an American playwright. He is best known for his plays The Adding Machine and his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of New York tenement life, Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein at 127 East 90th Street in New York City, New York. His grandfather was a political activist in the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states, after the failure of that political upheaval, he emigrated to the United States where he became a businessman. A staunch atheist, his grandfather may also have influenced Elmer in his feelings about religion as he refused to attend Hebrew school or to have a bar mitzvah, in contrast, Rices relationship with father was very distant. As he wrote in his autobiography, his grandfather and his Uncle Will, both of whom boarded with the family, made up for the affection and attention his father withheld. A child of the tenements, Rice spent much of his reading, to his familys consternation. Though he disliked legal studies and spent a deal of class time reading plays in class, Rice graduated from New York Law School in 1912. Courtroom dramas became a Rice specialty, needing to make a living, he decided to try writing full-time. His first play, On Trial, a murder mystery, was a great success. George M. Cohan offered to buy the rights for $30,000, co-authored with a friend, Frank Harris, the play was purportedly the first American drama to employ the technique of reverse-chronology, telling the story from its conclusion to its starting-point. The author ultimately earned $100,000 from his first work for the stage, none of his later plays earned him as much as On Trial. The play was adapted for the three times, in 1917,1928, and 1939. Political and social issues occupied Rices attention in this period as well, world War I and Woodrow Wilsons conservatism confirmed him in his criticism of the status quo. A satire about the growing regimentation of life in the machine age, when Mr. Zero, a mere cog in the corporate machine, discovers that he is to be replaced at work by an adding machine, he snaps and murders his boss. After his trial and execution, he enters the next life only to confront some of the issues and. Theatre critic Brooks Atkinson called it the most original and brilliant play any American had written up to that time. the harshest and most illuminating play about modern society, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott were enthusiastic. Other reviewers spoke of him, hyperbolically, as a writer who might become Americas Ibsen, ironically, it made its author no money at all. When Dorothy Parker was at work on her own play the year and needed a co-author, she approached Elmer Rice
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Susan Glaspell
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Susan Keating Glaspell was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook she founded the Provincetown Players, during the Great Depression she served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project. A prolific writer, Glaspell is known to have composed nine novels, fifteen plays, over fifty short stories, a best-selling author in her own time, Glaspells stories fell out of print after her death, during which time she was remembered primarily for discovering Eugene ONeill. Critical reassessment has led to renewed interest in her career, and she is recognized as a pioneering feminist writer. Susan Glaspell was born in 1876 to Elmer Glaspell, a hay farmer, and Alice Keating, having a fairly conservative upbringing, Susie was remembered as a precocious child who would often rescue stray animals. During the Panic of 1893, the farm was sold and Glaspell moved with her family into the city, Glaspell was an active student in Davenports public schools, taking an advanced course of study and giving a commencement speech at her 1894 graduation. By age eighteen she was earning a salary as a journalist for a local newspaper. At twenty-one Glaspell enrolled at Drake University, against the local belief that college makes women unfit for marriage. A philosophy major, she excelled in male-dominated debate competitions, winning the right to represent Drake at the debate tournament her senior year. A Des Moines Daily News article on her graduation ceremony cited Glaspell as a leader in the social and intellectual life of the university. After covering the conviction of an accused of murdering her abusive husband, Glaspell abruptly resigned at age twenty-four. Unlike most new writers, her stories were published by the most widely read periodicals, including Harpers, Munseys, The Ladies Home Journal. A large cash prize from a short story magazine financed her transition to Chicago, Glaspells second novel, The Visioning, was published in 1911. New York Times said of the book, it does prove Miss Glaspells staying power, her possession of abilities that put her high among the ranks of American storytellers and her third novel, Fidelity, was published in 1915. New York Times called it a big and real contribution to American novels, while in Davenport, Glaspell associated with other local writers to form the Davenport group. Among them was George Cram Cook, a classics professor. Though he was already in his second, troubled marriage, Glaspell fell in love with him, Glaspell became a leading member of Heterodoxy, an early feminist debating group composed of the premier womens rights crusaders. After a series of miscarriages, she underwent surgery to remove a fibroid tumor pressed against her uterus, still weak from the operation, Glaspell and Cook started a nonprofit theatre company in a refurbished fishing wharf across the road from their rented summer cottage in Provincetown, Cape Cod
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Morrie Ryskind
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Morrie Ryskind was an American dramatist, lyricist and writer of theatrical productions and motion pictures, who became a conservative political activist later in life. Ryskind was born in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Ida, Ryskind was criticizing Butler for refusing to allow Count Nikolai Tolstoy, nephew of Leo Tolstoy, to speak on campus. He collaborated with George S. Kaufman on several Broadway hits, in 1933, he earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the Broadway production Of Thee I Sing, a musical written in collaboration with composer George Gershwin. Ryskind also rewrote the stage version of Room Service, the original of which did not have the Marx Brothers, during this period, Ryskind was also twice nominated for an Academy Award for his part in writing the films My Man Godfrey and Stage Door. Later, he wrote the screenplay for the successful Penny Serenade, wrote the stage musical Louisiana Purchase and his politics soon moved to the right. He maintained some ties to the Socialist Party throughout the 1940s, about this time, he became a friend to writers Max Eastman, Ayn Rand, John Dos Passos, Suzanne La Follette and Raymond Moley. Later, he would become friend to William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1947, he appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a Friendly Witness. Ryskind briefly joined the John Birch Society, but soon disassociated himself from the group when they began to claim that Roosevelt, Truman and he was also a vocal sympathizer with the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. Starting in 1960, Ryskind wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times. His son, Allan H. Ryskind, was the editor of the conservative Washington. The elder Ryskinds autobiography, I Shot an Elephant in My Pajamas, The Morrie Ryskind Story, details his adventures from Broadway to Hollywood and its in the Bag. starring Fred Allen George S. Kaufman et al
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Ira Gershwin
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Ira Gershwin was an American lyricist who collaborated with his younger brother, composer George Gershwin, to create some of the most memorable songs of the 20th century. With George he wrote more than a dozen Broadway shows, featuring songs such as I Got Rhythm, Embraceable You, The Man I Love and he was also responsible, along with DuBose Heyward, for the libretto to Georges opera Porgy and Bess. The success the brothers had with their works has often overshadowed the creative role that Ira played. However, his mastery of songwriting continued after the death of George. He wrote additional hit songs with composers Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill, Gershwin was born Israel Gershowitz in New York City, the oldest of four children of Morris and Rose Gershovitz. He was followed by George in 1898, Arthur in 1900, Morris changed the family name to Gershwine, or alternatively Gershvin well before their children rose to fame. Shy in his youth, he spent much of his time at home reading and he graduated from Townsend Harris High School in 1914, where he met Yip Harburg, with whom he enjoyed a lifelong friendship, and a love of Gilbert and Sullivan. He attended the City College of New York but dropped out, the childhood home of Ira and George Gershwin was in the center of the Yiddish Theater District, on the second floor at 91 Second Avenue, between East 5th Street and East 6th Street. They frequented the local Yiddish theaters, while his younger brother began composing and plugging in Tin Pan Alley from the age of eighteen, Ira worked as a cashier in his fathers Turkish baths. It was not until 1921 that Ira became involved in the music business, alex Aarons signed Ira to write the songs for his next show, Two Little Girls in Blue, ultimately produced by Abraham Erlanger, along with co-composers Vincent Youmans and Paul Lannin. So as not to appear to trade off his brothers growing reputation, he wrote under the pseudonym Arthur Francis, Gershwins lyrics were well received, and allowed him to successfully enter the show-business world with just one show. Later the same year, the Gershwins collaborated for the first time on a score, for A Dangerous Maid and it was not until 1924 that Ira and George Gershwin teamed up to write the music for their first Broadway hit Lady, Be Good. Once the brothers joined forces, their combined talents became one of the most influential forces in the history of American Musical Theatre, when the Gershwins teamed up to write songs for Lady, Be Good, the American musical found its native idiom. Together, they wrote the music for more than twelve shows, some of their more famous works include The Man I Love, Fascinating Rhythm, Someone to Watch Over Me, I Got Rhythm and They Cant Take That Away from Me. Their partnership continued until Georges sudden death from a tumor in 1937. Following his brothers death, Ira waited nearly three years before writing again, after this temporary retirement, he teamed up with such accomplished composers as Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill, and Harold Arlen. Over the next fourteen years, Gershwin continued to write the lyrics for film scores. But the failure of Park Avenue in 1946, a show about divorce
37.
Maxwell Anderson
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James Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright, author, poet, journalist and lyricist. Anderson was born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, the second of eight children to William Lincoln Link Anderson, a Baptist minister, and Charlotte Perrimela Stephenson, both of Scots and Irish descent. His family initially lived on his maternal grandmother Sheperds farm in Atlantic, then moved to Andover, Ohio and they moved often, to follow their fathers ministerial posts, and Maxwell was frequently sick, missing a great deal of school. He used his time sick in bed to read voraciously, during a visit to his grandmothers house in Atlantic, at age 11, he met the first love of his life, Hallie Loomis, a slightly older girl from a wealthier family. His autobiographical tale, Morning, Winter and Night told of rape, incest and it was published under a pseudonym, John Nairne Michealson, to prevent offending family. The Andersons bounced between Andover, Ohio, Richmond Center, Ohio, Townville, Pa, harrisburg, Pa. to Jamestown, North Dakota in 1907, where Anderson attended Jamestown High School, graduating in 1908. As an undergraduate, he waited tables and worked at the copy desk of the Grand Forks Herald. He obtained a BA in English Literature from the University of North Dakota in 1911 and he became the principal of a high school in Minnewaukan, North Dakota, also teaching English there, but was fired in 1913 for making pacifist statements to his students. He then entered Stanford University, obtaining an M. A. in English Literature in 1914 and he became a high school English teacher in San Francisco, after three years he became chairman of the English department at Whittier College in 1917. He was fired after a year for public statements supporting Arthur Camp, Anderson moved to Palo Alto to write for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, but was fired for writing an editorial stating that it would be impossible for Germany to pay off its war debt. So he moved to San Francisco to write for the San Francisco Chronicle, alvin Johnson hired Anderson to move to New York City and write about politics for The New Republic in 1918, but he was fired after an argument with Editor-in-Chief Herbert David Croly. Anderson found work at The New York Globe, and the New York World, in 1921, he founded The Measure, A Journal of Poetry, a magazine devoted to verse. Which was successfully produced in 1924 in New York City, afterwards he resigned from the World, launching his career as a dramatist. His plays are in varying styles, and Anderson was one of the few modern playwrights to make extensive use of blank verse. His first Broadway hit was the gritty 1924 World War I comedy-drama, What Price Glory, the play was notable for its use of profanity, which caused censors to protest. But when the chief censor was found to have far more obscene letters to General Chamberlaine, he was discredited. The only one of his plays that he adapted to the screen was Joan of Lorraine. When Bergman and her director changed much of his dialogue to make Joan a plaster saint he called her a big, dumb, goddamn Swede
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Sidney Kingsley
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Sidney Kingsley was an American dramatist. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Men in White in 1934, Kingsley was born Sidney Kirschner in New York. He studied at Cornell University, where he began his career writing plays for the dramatic club. He joined the Group Theater for the production of his first major work, in 1933 the company performed his play Men in White. The play was a box-office smash, Kingsley followed this success with the play Dead End in 1935. A story about slum housing and its connection to crime, the piece was also fairly successful, the two plays which followed, the anti-war Ten Million Ghosts of 1936 and The World We Make of 1939, were flops and had short runs. But in 1943 Kingsley returned to his previous success with the historical drama The Patriots and this play, which told the story of Thomas Jefferson and his activities in the young American republic, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. In addition to his work for the stage, Kingsley wrote a number of scripts for Hollywood productions, Kingsley hired Korda as an assistant to do research for a screenplay he was writing for CBS on the Hungarian Revolution which was eventually canceled. In 1965 Kingsley was elected president of the American Dramatists Guild and in 1983, Kingsley died of a stroke on March 20,1995, in his home in Oakland, New Jersey
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Zoe Akins
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Zoë Akins was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright, poet, and author. Zoë Byrd Akins was born in Humansville, Missouri, second of three children of Thomas Jasper and Sarah Elizabeth Green Akins and her family was heavily involved with the Missouri Republican Party, and for several years her father served as the state party chairman. Through her mother Zoe Akins was related to prominent figures like George Washington and her family moved to St. Louis, Missouri when Zoe was in her early teens. She was sent to Monticello Seminary in nearby Godfrey, Illinois for her education, while at Hosmer Hall she was a classmate of poet Sara Teasdale, both graduating with the Class of 1903. It was at Monticello Seminary that Akins wrote her first play, following graduation Akins began writing a series of plays, poetry and criticism for various magazines and newspapers as well as occasional acting roles in St. Louis area theatre productions. Her first major work was Papa, written in 1914. The comedy failed even though it greatly impressed both H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, and she continued to write and she followed up with two other plays, The Magical City and Déclassée. The latter play, which starred Ethel Barrymore, was not only a success but something of a sensation. During this time several of her plays were adapted for the screen. These adaptations were mostly failures, released as silent films in a time when the industry was transitioning to sound, while some talkie stars had notable roles in the films, most of the films are now believed to be lost. Two highlights of this period were the films Sarah and Son and Morning Glory, both films earned their respective female leads Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. Despite the fame afforded her, Akins didnt pursue a career beyond her early successes. In 1932, she married Hugo Rumbold, and after several Hollywood films, she returned to writing plays and she was the great-aunt of actress Laurie Metcalf. She lived for a time in Morrisonville, Illinois. Akins died in her sleep on the eve of her seventy-second birthday, in Los Angeles
40.
Robert E. Sherwood
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Robert Emmet Sherwood was an American playwright, editor, and screenwriter. His aunts included the notable American portrait artists Lydia Field Emmet, Jane Emmet de Glehn and his first cousin, Sherwood was educated at Fay School, Milton Academy and then Harvard University. He fought with the Royal Highlanders of Canada, CEF in Europe during World War I and was wounded, after his return to the U. S. he began working as a movie critic for such magazines as Life and Vanity Fair. The career of Robert E. Sherwood was one of the members of the Algonquin Round Table. He was close friends with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, who were on the staff of Vanity Fair with Sherwood when the Round Table began meeting in 1919, author Edna Ferber was also a good friend. Sherwood stood 6 feet 8 inches tall, Dorothy Parker, who was 5 feet 4 inches, once commented that when she, Sherwood, and Robert Benchley walked down the street together, they resembled a walking pipe organ. When asked at a party how long he had known Sherwood, Benchley stood on a chair, raised his hand to the ceiling, and said, I knew Bob Sherwood back when he was only this tall. Sherwoods first Broadway play, The Road to Rome, a comedy concerning Hannibals botched invasion of Rome, introduced one of his favorite themes, many of his later dramatic works employed variations of that motif, including Idiots Delight, which won Sherwood the first of four Pulitzer Prizes. According to legend, he admitted to the gossip columnist Lucius Beebe, “The trouble with me is that I start with a big message and end up with nothing but good entertainment. ”Sherwoods Broadway success soon attracted the attention of Hollywood. While some of his work went uncredited, his films included many adaptations of his plays and he also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock and Joan Harrison in writing the screenplay for Rebecca. With Europe in the midst of World War II, Sherwood set aside his anti-war stance to support the fight against the Third Reich. His 1940 play about Russias invasion of Finland, There Shall Be No Night, was produced by the Playwrights Company which he co-founded and starred Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, katharine Cornell produced and starred in a 1957 TV adaptation on NBC. Sherwood publicly ridiculed isolationist Charles Lindbergh as a Nazi with a Nazis Olympian contempt for all democratic processes, during this period Sherwood also served as a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He recounted the experience in his book Roosevelt and Hopkins, An Intimate History, which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, Sherwood is credited with originating the phrase that eventually evolved to arsenal of democracy, a frequent catchphrase in Roosevelts wartime speeches. Sherwood was quoted on May 12,1940 by the New York Times, This country is already, in effect, the 1946 film, which explores changes in the lives of three servicemen after they return home from war, earned Sherwood an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Sherwood died of an attack in New York City in 1955. A production of Small War on Murray Hill debuted at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on January 3,1957, Sherwood was portrayed by the actor Nick Cassavetes in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. The Road to Rome The Love Nest The Queens Husband, adapted into the 1931 film The Royal Bed, waterloo Bridge - adapted into two American films and two Brazilian soap-operas This is New York, adapted into the 1932 film Two Kinds of Women
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Moss Hart
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Moss Hart was an American playwright and theatre director. Hart was born in New York City and grew up in poverty with his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx and in Sea Gate. Early on he had a relationship with his Aunt Kate. She piqued his interest in the theater and took him to see performances often, Hart even went so far as to create an alternate ending to her life in his book Act One. He writes that she died while he was working on out-of-town tryouts for The Beloved Bandit, later, Kate became eccentric and then disturbed, vandalizing Harts home, writing threatening letters and setting fires backstage during rehearsals for Jubilee. But his relationship with her was formative and he learned that the theater made possible the art of being somebody else… not a scrawny boy with bad teeth, a funny name… and a mother who was a distant drudge. The play was written in collaboration with Broadway veteran George S. Kaufman, during the next decade, Kaufman and Hart teamed on a string of successes, including You Cant Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Though Kaufman had hits with others, Hart is generally conceded to be his most important collaborator and you Cant Take It With You, the story of an eccentric family and how they live during the Depression, won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for drama. When director Frank Capra and writer Robert Riskin adapted it for the screen in 1938, the Man Who Came To Dinner is about the caustic Sheridan Whiteside who, after injuring himself slipping on ice, must stay in a Midwestern familys house. The character was based on Kaufman and Harts friend, critic Alexander Woollcott, other characters in the play are based on Noël Coward, Harpo Marx and Gertrude Lawrence. However, he became best known during this period as a director, among the Broadway hits he staged were Junior Miss, Dear Ruth and Anniversary Waltz. By far his biggest hit was the musical My Fair Lady, adapted from George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, the show ran over seven years and won a Tony Award for Best Musical. Hart picked up the Tony for Best Director, Hart also wrote some screenplays, including Gentlemans Agreement – for which he received an Oscar nomination – Hans Christian Andersen and A Star Is Born. He wrote a memoir, Act One, An Autobiography by Moss Hart and it was adapted to film in 1963, with George Hamilton portraying Hart. The last show Hart directed was the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, during a troubled out-of-town tryout, Hart had a heart attack. The show opened before he recovered, but he and Lerner reworked it after the opening. That, along with huge pre-sales and a cast performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in 1972,11 years after his death, Moss Hart was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. He was one of 23 people to be selected into the Hall of Fames first ever induction class that year, Hart married Kitty Carlisle on August 10,1946, they had two children
