What is behrman's biography
Answers
Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was an American playwright, screenwriter, biographer, and longtime writer for The New Yorker. His son is the composer David Behrman.
Born: 9 June 1893, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States
Died: 9 September 1973, New York, New York, United States
Children: David Behrman
Education: Columbia University, Clark University, Harvard University
Awards: New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play
Behrman's two most anthologized plays, which continued to be revived in regional theaters through the twentieth century, are Biography (1932) and End of Summer (1936). Like many of Behrman's plays, they are character studies more than plot-filled dramas.
Biography tells the story of Marion Froude, a noted portrait painter, who has been prevailed upon by an abrasive leftwing publisher, Richard Kurt, to write her serialized memoirs for his magazine. A former lover with senatorial aspirations, Leander Nolan, hopes to marry into a conservative, politically well-placed southern family. He wants Marion to abandon the project, fearing that he will be named in her book and his plans derailed. A liberal woman who has painted both Roman Catholic prelates and Lenin himself, Marion must choose (she destroys her manuscript in the end), but is ultimately alienated by both Kurt's proletarian rigidity and Leander's smug conservatism. Biography starred Ina Claire and ran on Broadway for 219 performances.[16]
End of Summer is about three women of different generations and values: forty-ish Leonie Frothingham, her elderly mother, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Paula. The three women, insulated from the Depression and its harsh realities by their money, live in summer comfort on an estate in Maine. A visiting psychiatrist disrupts their complacency. He is attracted to both the divorced Leonie and her daughter but schemes to marry Leonie to gain control of her money, until his plan is revealed by Paula. Other characters, including a young man romantically attached to Paula and a Russian emigre-friend of the family, visit the house and talk about their lives, aspirations, and political leanings. Will, Paula's potential fiancé, cannot reconcile his activist politics with the thought of marrying into a family with so much money. One writer described End of Summer as "a Chekhovian play which emphasizes the disappearance or demise of an old, conservative order [represented by Leonie's mother] and the emergence of the new, more radical way of American life." The play also starred Ina Claire and ran on Broadway for 153 performances.[17]
People in a Diary (1972), a memoir, could also be regarded as a major Behrman work and a well-crafted example of its genre. Published eighteen years after his first memoir, The Worcester Account, it is a collection of autobiographical essays and sketches culled from the sixty volumes of diaries Behrman had been keeping since his time at Harvard in 1915. "An odd quirk of destiny has put a great many people in my way," he wrote in a significant understatement, declaring that his purpose in the book was to "revive their society" and the vibrant times they had shared. The cast of characters in People in a Diary gives an idea of the breadth and depth of Behrman's life: e.g., Greta Garbo, Laurence Olivier, Louis B. Mayer, Jean Giradoux, Somerset Maugham, Eugene O'Neill, Noël Coward, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Berenson, the Gershwins, and the Marx Brothers. The book also contains some biting observations about the direction modern America had taken in the 1960s as it waged war in Vietnam and became more obsessed with money and imperial ambitions
Hopes this helps uh ✌️