SOURCE: Hecht, Ben. Saturday Review 44, no. 25 (24 June 1961): 5.

In the following tribute, Hecht laments that by the time of Kaufman's death, the kind of irony and satire he wrote had become passé.

In the last ten years of his life George S. Kaufman found himself as obsolete as a Smithsonian exhibit. He was a practitioner of irony and satire, with a side line of bon mots. The USA, hell-bent on making the whole world as noble as itself, had no welcome mat out for tricky-minded fellows poking fun at it.

Such a one was Kaufman. He was almost the last of the Broadway breed of iconoclasts, a breed that indulged in derision rather than breakage. It also preferred to lampoon American flaws under its nose, rather than clobber the cockeyed behavior of far-off Russians and Chinese.

Kaufman's writings for the stage and magazines varied in excellence but seldom in...