Robert E. Sherwood

Robert Emmet Sherwood (April 4, 1896 – November 14, 1955) wrote plays and screenplays. His credits include *Waterloo Bridge*, *Idiot's Delight*, *Abe Lincoln in Illinois*, *There Shall Be No Night*, and *The Best Years of Our Lives*, and he worked on the screen adaptations of *Rebecca* and *The Bishop's Wife*. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama three times (1936, 1939, 1941), an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (1947), and a Pulitzer Prize for Biography (1949).

Sherwood was born in New Rochelle, New York, to Arthur Murray Sherwood, a wealthy stockbroker who helped start *The Harvard Lampoon*, and Rosina Emmet Sherwood, a noted illustrator and portrait painter. His paternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood, was an author and social figure. He was a great-great-grandson of New York State Attorney General Thomas Addis Emmet and a great-grandnephew of Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, executed for treason after the 1803 rebellion. His aunts Lydia Field Emmet and Jane Emmet de Glehn, and his first cousin once removed Ellen Emmet Rand, were all notable portrait artists.

He attended Fay School, Milton Academy, and Harvard University from 1914 to 1917. He left Harvard to join the 42nd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force after the U.S. Army rejected him for being too tall. In France during World War I, he was gassed and wounded twice. After returning home, he became a movie critic for magazines like *Life* and *Vanity Fair*. His critical work in the 1920s is covered in the 2009 documentary *For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism*, where *Time* critic Richard Schickel notes Sherwood was the first New York critic invited to Hollywood by train to meet stars and directors.

Sherwood was an original member of the Algonquin Round Table, close friends with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, who worked with him at *Vanity Fair* when the group began meeting in 1919. Author Edna Ferber was also a close friend. In 1920, he became editor of *Life*.

His first Broadway play, *The Road to Rome* (1927), a comedy about Hannibal’s failed invasion of Rome, introduced a recurring theme: the futility of war. Many later works, including *Idiot's Delight* (1936), which won his first Pulitzer, played with this idea. He once told gossip columnist Lucius Beebe, “The trouble with me is that I start with a big message and end up with nothing but good entertainment.” He served as president of the Dramatists Guild of America from 1937 to 1939.

Hollywood took notice of his Broadway success, and he began writing for film in 1926. Some work went uncredited, but his films often adapted his own plays. He co-wrote the screenplay for *Rebecca* (1940) with Alfred Hitchcock and Joan Harrison. During World War II, he set aside his anti-war views to support the fight against the Third Reich. His 1940 play *There Shall Be No Night*, about the Soviet invasion of Finland, was produced by the Playwright’s Company he co-founded and starred Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and Montgomery Clift; Katharine Cornell produced and starred in a 1957 TV adaptation. Sherwood publicly called isolationist Charles Lindbergh a "Nazi with a Nazi's Olympian contempt for all democratic processes."

He also wrote speeches for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This experience led to his book *Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History*, which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and a Bancroft Prize. Sherwood is credited with originating the phrase that became "Arsenal of Democracy"; *The New York Times* quoted him on May 12, 1940, saying, "This country is already, in effect, an arsenal for the democratic Allies." After serving as director of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information from 1943 until the war’s end, he returned to dramatic writing with *The Best Years of Our Lives* (1946), directed by William Wyler, which earned him an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

Sherwood stood 6 feet 8 inches tall. Dorothy Parker, who was 5 feet 4 inches, once said that when she, Sherwood, and Robert Benchley (6 feet) walked together, they looked like "a walking pipe organ." At a party, when asked how long he had known Sherwood, Benchley stood on a chair, raised his hand to the ceiling, and said, "I knew Bob Sherwood back when he was only this tall." In a 1949 episode of *You Bet Your Life*, host Groucho Marx, after interviewing a tall Green Bay Packers player, recalled, "Reminds me of Bob Sherwood, the playwright, he's an old friend of mine; and he's six-foot-five and very thin. I said to him one day 'Bob, what do you say to people whe..."