Samuel Nathaniel Behrman ranks as one of the most distinguished writers of sophisticated comedy at a time when the American theatre reached its highest point of urbanity and productivity. With only two solo efforts mounted for Broadway, Behrman already had been identified as one of "Six Playwrights Who Have Thumbprinted Contemporary Broadway" in the June 1929 issue of Theatre. His durable career spanned nearly forty years across five decades. As may be anticipated with any endeavor which depends upon the passing whim of the public, Behrman's theatrical fortune fluctuated to extremes through the last of the Roaring Twenties, Depression thirties, war-torn forties, specious fifties and into the riotous sixties. As Cecil Beaton observes in his Memoires of the 40's: "The span of a dramatist's talent is the shortest of all, and few playwrights continue to be successful for more than ten years." Behrman managed to buffer his theatrical labors...