"To be able to write a play for performance in a theatre," he noted, "a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.... He must not shrink from the old hokum; he must actually love it."
"Something of a poet" and "something of a damned fool," Robert Sherwood was descended from a line of artists and patriots. The Sherwood family was artistic; the Emmet family was animated by the cause of Irish freedom. The Sherwoods were conservatives; the Emmets liberals. Sherwood's mother, Rosina Emmet Sherwood, merited an entry in Who's Who on the basis of her artwork; Sherwood's paternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood, a social gadfly, was the author of hundreds of articles and over twenty books; Sherwood's father, Arthur Murray Sherwood, a successful investment broker, was also a theatre buff who had, in his youth, been active in Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club, as well as the founder and first editor of the Harvard Lampoon.
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