A sizable majority of his twenty-five hits contain at least one character connected with the theatre, films, or the music business.
Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh in 1889, a descendant of early German/Jewish immigrants to the region. A year before his birth his only brother, Richard, died at the age of two, and his emotionally unstable mother Nettie therefore neurotically overprotected George. As a result Kaufman grew up with ineradicable phobias about food, failure, physical contact, illness, and death. Nevertheless, his childhood was not on the whole unhappy. He enjoyed playing baseball and card games, reading-- Mark Twain and W.S. Gilbert were early favorites--and attending plays and vaudeville shows. At fourteen he wrote his first play, "The Failure," in collaboration with a friend, Irving Pichel, who later became a successful Hollywood actor and director. Kaufman also acted in plays performed by the dramatic society at Rodeph Shalom Temple, his family's synagogue.
After graduating from high school in 1907, Kaufman entered law school at the Western University of Pennsylvania (later the University of Pittsburgh). But he contracted pleurisy during his first semester and withdrew. When recovered, he did not return to school but undertook a series of short-lived jobs, as a member of a surveying team, as a clerk in the Allegheny County Tax Office, and then as stenographer to the controller of the Pittsburgh Coal Company.
This is a free page. This page contains 183 words. This
biography contains 9,806 words (approx. 33 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our George S. Kaufman Access Pass.
