SOURCE: Gould, Jean. “Some Clever Collaboratos.” In Modern American Playwrights pp. 135-167. Dodd, Mead & Company, 1966.

In the following excerpted essay, Gould describes how Kaufman and Hart worked when they collaborated.

For exactly a decade, from 1930, with Once in a Lifetime, to 1940, with George Washington Slept Here, two masters of comedic playwriting, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, contributed their combined wit and humor to the American theater in the form of six plays and two musicals. Three of the plays were outstanding works, one of which captured the Pulitzer prize. Their initial effort was an achievement in high comedy that ran for two years and won the Rio Cooper McGrue prize.

George S. Kaufman, the older of the two by some fifteen years, was born in 1889, the son of Joseph and Nettie Kaufman, in Pittsburgh. There seems to have been little out of the ordinary in his background...