As a child, Behrman was befriended by Daniel Asher, a local intellectual who became his mentor, and it was Asher who introduced Behrman to the theater, taking him to see a melodrama titled Devil's Island when Behrman was eleven years old. At fifteen, without his parents' knowledge, Behrman took a trip to New York and was impressed by the theater district. This trip seems to have left him determined to become active on the stage; after graduating from high school, he toured the vaudeville circuit performing in a skit he had written. His health was not good during these years, and he eventually returned home. He enrolled in Clark College and became an assistant to the Board of Publications but was suspended several times for failure to attend physical education classes. He finally transferred to Harvard at Asher's suggestion. While at Harvard, he worked in theater productions and wrote plays and sold his first short story to the Parisienne in 1915 for fifteen dollars. Behrman graduated with a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1916 and received his master's degree from Columbia University in 1918. He spent two years working at the New York Times, first writing classified advertisements, then book reviews.
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