Robert E. Sherwood Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Robert E. Sherwood, born Robert Emmet Sherwood in 1896, emerged from an American family steeped in culture and public life. Raised in an environment that valued letters and public discourse, he showed an early aptitude for writing and a keen interest in history and politics. He pursued higher education at Harvard University, where he gravitated toward campus publications and the theater, experiences that sharpened his wit, broadened his range as a critic, and set him on a path toward a life in the arts. The outbreak of World War I interrupted his early career plans; he served in uniform, sustaining injuries at the front. The war left an indelible mark on his outlook, shaping a deep skepticism of militarism and a belief in humane international engagement that would echo through his plays and essays.

Journalism and the Algonquin Round Table
After the war, Sherwood settled into New York's literary world as a critic and essayist. He wrote for prominent magazines, including Life and Vanity Fair, where his incisive criticism and distinctive voice gained notice. At Vanity Fair he worked alongside Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley; when Parker was dismissed from the magazine, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in solidarity, a formative episode that underscored his loyalty to colleagues and his sense of artistic principle. He became a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, trading barbs and ideas with Parker, Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Marc Connelly, and others. This community honed his timing and gave him a sounding board for ideas that would later reach Broadway and Hollywood.

Early Plays and Breakthrough
Sherwood transitioned from critic to playwright in the 1920s, quickly distinguishing himself with dialogues that balanced caustic humor and moral seriousness. The Road to Rome offered a comic, antiwar reimagining of ancient history, foregrounding the absurdities of conquest. Waterloo Bridge traced the emotional wreckage of war on private lives, a theme drawn from his own experience and one that resonated with audiences during the interwar years. His works attracted gifted producers and actors who recognized in his writing an unusual blend of literary craftsmanship and box-office vitality.

The Petrified Forest and Thematic Maturity
With The Petrified Forest, Sherwood delved into the tension between individual aspiration and a society shadowed by violence and disillusionment. The play's stage success led to a celebrated film adaptation starring Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, cementing Sherwood's national prominence and demonstrating his capacity to craft roles that actors seized upon. Idiot's Delight, which earned him one of his multiple Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, confronted the drift toward global conflict with songs, satire, and shattering irony. Abe Lincoln in Illinois presented an ideal of leadership rooted in conscience and eloquence, with a humane portrait of Abraham Lincoln that appealed to audiences seeking moral clarity in turbulent times. There Shall Be No Night, set against the outbreak of war in Europe, further confirmed his reputation for dramatizing geopolitical crises through intimate scenes and fully realized characters; stage legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne helped carry its impact with performances that audiences and critics remembered.

Institution Building and The Playwrights' Company
Committed to the autonomy and professional standing of dramatists, Sherwood joined forces with peers including Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Elmer Rice, and Sidney Howard to found The Playwrights' Company. In creating an organization controlled by writers rather than solely by commercial producers, they sought to protect artistic integrity while sustaining a high standard of production. This collective effort reflected the camaraderie and seriousness of purpose that Sherwood had exhibited since his Algonquin days and helped shape the ecology of American theater for years to come.

Hollywood and the Wider Audience
Sherwood's fluency in narrative and character led naturally to screenwriting. He adapted and originated material for the screen, collaborating with major producers and directors. His screenplay for The Best Years of Our Lives, produced by Samuel Goldwyn and directed by William Wyler, became a landmark American film about veterans' reintegration after World War II. The project's empathy for returning soldiers connected directly to issues that had long preoccupied him, and his work on the film earned the industry's highest recognition. Earlier, his stage scripts, including Waterloo Bridge and The Petrified Forest, proved fertile for cinema, introducing his themes to audiences far beyond Broadway.

Public Service and World War II
As the world lurched into another global conflict, Sherwood put his pen at the service of national communication. He advised and drafted material for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, working alongside figures such as Harry Hopkins and Samuel Rosenman and contributing to the administration's wartime messaging. At the Office of War Information under director Elmer Davis, he took on responsibilities that linked culture and policy, helping to clarify American aims to domestic and overseas audiences. His prose, by turns plainspoken and elevated, aimed to bolster democratic resolve without sacrificing nuance. After the war, he drew on his access and notes to write Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, a deeply researched narrative that quickly became an essential source for understanding the administration's inner workings and the diplomacy of the wartime years.

Style, Concerns, and Influence
Across genres, Sherwood's signature was a humane skepticism: he distrusted cant and brutality yet believed in the capacity of individuals, and especially of leaders guided by conscience, to rise to history's demands. His dialogue fused wit with moral argument, and he consistently sought to dramatize large public questions in private rooms. Colleagues recognized this quality, whether at the Algonquin lunch table or in rehearsal halls, and many of the era's leading performers and producers gravitated toward his material because it gave them something substantive to play. He moved easily between the give-and-take of New York theater and the collaborative machinery of Hollywood, while keeping one eye on Washington at a time when words could help rally a nation.

Later Years and Legacy
Sherwood remained active in letters through the late 1940s and early 1950s, continuing to write for stage and screen and to comment on public affairs. He died in 1955, leaving behind a body of work that spans decades of American self-examination: from the bitter lessons of World War I to the moral tests of the Depression, the rise of totalitarianism, and the aftermath of World War II. His multiple Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, his Academy Award for screenwriting, and his widely respected historical writing testify to a career unusually broad in scope and unusually consistent in principle. Among playwrights and screenwriters, he is remembered as a craftsman who believed that entertainment and ethical inquiry could be one, and among historians and citizens, as a writer who brought clarity and compassion to the story of a democratic nation under strain. The friendships and collaborations that animated his life, with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley in the sharp-witted New York of the 1920s, with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins in the crucible of the 1940s, and with artists like William Wyler, Samuel Goldwyn, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne, frame a career that helped define American culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Writing - Life - Confidence.

Other people realated to Robert: Sam Goldwyn (Businessman)