E. Y. Harburg Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Isidore Hochberg, later known as E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, was born on April 8, 1896, on New York City's Lower East Side, a dense immigrant world of Yiddish theater marquees, union halls, and tenement stairwells where ambition and insecurity lived door to door. His parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants; the family name and neighborhood rhythms placed him inside the great American argument about who belonged and what success cost. The boy who would write America's most consoling fantasies and sharpest popular satire grew up hearing both the promises of the New World and the daily evidence of its cruelties.

That double vision hardened early. Harburg came of age as mass culture rose - Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, and the Broadway revue - while industrial capitalism produced spectacular wealth beside precarious labor. He watched friends chase mobility through school, commerce, and show business; he also saw how quickly fortunes could flip, a lesson that would later give his lyrics their distinctive sympathy for "ordinary" people and their suspicion of easy certainty. Even before the headlines, his inner weather was set by contrasts: comic surfaces hiding anxiety, and sentiment edged with social critique.

Education and Formative Influences

Harburg attended City College of New York, a crucible for first-generation students and political debate, where he befriended Ira Gershwin and absorbed a lifetime habit of mixing wit with argument. After service during World War I, he tried the straight path - a job in business, then co-ownership of an importing firm - until the 1929 crash wiped him out. That collapse did not merely redirect his career; it pushed him toward a vocation in which his feelings about money, justice, and belonging could become rhyme and melody.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Turning to songwriting professionally in the early 1930s, Harburg quickly became one of Broadway and Hollywood's most literate lyricists, often pairing an exuberant singability with a subtext of skepticism. He contributed to revues and films across the decade, with major early successes including "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (music by Jay Gorney), an anthem of Depression disillusion that spoke in the voice of the discarded builder-soldier. His most famous work came with MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939), for which he wrote the lyrics - including "Over the Rainbow" (music by Harold Arlen) - and helped shape a humane story architecture that balanced innocence with menace. On Broadway, his collaboration with Arlen produced Finian's Rainbow (1947), a fantasy shot through labor politics and racial satire. The Cold War then narrowed his options: Harburg was blacklisted in the early 1950s after being named in congressional investigations, losing access to film work and much mainstream patronage. He fought back with writing, lecturing, and theater projects, and in later years remained an articulate defender of artistic freedom until his death on March 4, 1981.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Harburg wrote like a man who believed pleasure could carry truth further than a speech. His own aesthetic can be heard in the principle that "Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought". That formulation describes not only craft but psychology: he distrusted abstraction unless it arrived embodied in sensation. The lyric, for him, was a bridge between conscience and desire, a way to smuggle moral awareness into the bloodstream of popular entertainment.

His style braided nursery-rhyme directness with adult irony - the cheerful hook that keeps singing even as the meaning darkens. In Oz, the communal chant "Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead". is jubilant and unsettling at once, a child's victory song that hints at how easily crowds bless violence when the target is labeled wicked. Yet Harburg was not a cynic; he was a radical sentimentalist, convinced that hope was a discipline. "Follow the fellow who follows a dream". reads as a pep line, but in his hands it becomes a political ethic: solidarity with the dreamer, suspicion of the complacent, and a belief that imagination is not escape but rehearsal for change.

Legacy and Influence

Harburg endures as a lyricist who made American popular song more morally ambitious without making it less fun to sing. "Over the Rainbow" became a global standard of longing, while "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" remains a template for socially conscious songwriting that does not surrender craft to slogan. His blacklist years turned him into a symbol of the costs of dissent, and his Broadway work - especially Finian's Rainbow - helped keep political satire alive in musical theater between the Depression and the postwar era. More broadly, Harburg's legacy is the proof that the sweetest melodies can carry the sharpest questions, and that a lyricist's inner life - fear of failure, empathy for outsiders, stubborn faith in possibility - can become part of a nation's shared language.