George S. Kaufman Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

George Simon Kaufman was born on November 16, 1889, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a Jewish family shaped by the practical rhythms of immigrant America. His father, Joseph Kaufman, worked in hat-making and related trades; the household learned to read people quickly, a skill that later became Kaufman's stagecraft. He grew up watching the U.S. turn corporate and urban, with newspapers, vaudeville, and department-store spectacle teaching a new language of hustle, aspiration, and social pretense.

As a young man he carried an air of skeptical self-possession that friends would later read as both armor and method. Even before Broadway, he cultivated the habit that defined his comic lens: treating sentiment as suspect, and regarding public life as a performance begging to be punctured. In an era of boosterism, he preferred the dry aside; in a culture of moral uplift, he searched for the angle that revealed vanity beneath virtue.

Education and Formative Influences

Kaufman attended public schools and briefly studied law at Western University of Pennsylvania (now the University of Pittsburgh), but the classroom could not compete with the immediacy of print and theater. He left without a degree and went into journalism, first at the Pittsburgh Gazette Times and then in New York, where he wrote for newspapers and magazines including the New York Times. The citys press rooms and rehearsal halls became his real education: copy deadlines honed compression, while the Broadway ecosystem taught him that dialogue is an instrument of power, not decoration.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Kaufman rose from critic and humorist to one of the defining dramatists of interwar Broadway, with collaboration as his signature medium. His partnership with Marc Connelly produced "Dulcy" (1921) and, most notably, "Merton of the Movies" (1922), a satire of American fame-making that already showed his instinct for dismantling illusions without preaching. With Edna Ferber he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "You Cant Take It with You" (1936), a warm yet barbed defense of eccentric freedom against moneyed conformity; with Moss Hart he created "Once in a Lifetime" (1930), a classic about Hollywoods chaos as sound film arrived, and later "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1939), whose Sheridan Whiteside turned misanthropy into virtuoso theatricality. He also directed major productions, including the original "Guys and Dolls" (1950), and remained a feared-and-needed doctor of scripts, valued for a surgical ear that could make a line land or a scene breathe.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Kaufmans inner life is legible in his refusal of fog. His comedy assumes that self-deception is the most common American talent, and that institutions - newspapers, show business, polite society, even idealistic families - are elaborate ways to disguise appetites. He distrusted grand theories and preferred rules of craft and conduct that kept him on solid ground, a temperament captured by his quip, "I like terra firma; the more firma, the less terra". It is not only a joke about travel; it is a worldview that values the dependable surface, the known rhythm, the tested line, and it explains why even his wildest farces feel engineered rather than rhapsodic.

His style is famously hard, fast, and bright - dialogue that snaps shut like a latch. Underneath that speed lies a psychological stance: comedy as boundary-setting. His remark, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night". , doubles as a credo about limits - the satirist can wound, but must also survive the box office, the audience, and the calendar. In rehearsal rooms he could be both essential and merciless, crystallized in, "At dramatic rehearsals, the only author that's better than an absent one is a dead one". The line suggests more than crankiness: it exposes his suspicion of ego and his need to protect the work from its makers, including himself. Across "Once in a Lifetime", "The Royal Family" (with Connelly, 1927), and "The Man Who Came to Dinner", Kaufman repeatedly turns celebrities and gatekeepers into comic mechanisms - people who speak in slogans until someone punctures the balloon.

Legacy and Influence

Kaufman died on June 2, 1961, in New York City, but his influence remains structural: he helped define the American Broadway comedy as a machine for revealing social truth at high speed. Later writers from Neil Simon to television-room punch-up artists inherited his belief that a line must do two jobs at once - characterize and detonate. His best plays endure not simply because they are funny, but because they diagnose modern life as a performance economy, where status is staged, sincerity is suspect, and the sharpest mercy is precision.