Lyricist Jack Yellen was a skillful journeyman songwriter who plied his trade, providing songs for sheet music, recordings, Broadway musicals, and Hollywood movies, for more than forty years. Though the songs he wrote with composer Milton Ager played an important role in establishing the popular music styles of the 1920s, Yellen's most important lyric, "Happy Days Are Here Again" (1930), became one of the rallying cries of the Depression.

Jacob Selig "Jack" Yellen was born on 6 July 1892 in Razcki, Poland, to Abraham Yellen and Bessie Wallens Yellen. The family migrated to the United States in 1897, settling in Buffalo, New York, where the father worked as a pawnbroker and Jack attended public schools. A chronically tardy student, Yellen wrote his first song, "You'll Have to Come to Old Central High," (1907) in an attempt to placate the principal. He earned a B.A. degree from the University of Michigan, where he...