The following essay discusses the work of Jay Landesman and his wife, Fran Landesman.

Jay and Fran Landesman are perhaps best known for Jay's editorship of the ground-breaking magazine, Neurotica , in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and for Fran's many lyrics for jazz-influenced popular songs. Together, they wrote the first, and so far the only, Beat musical, The Nervous Set, and several other musical plays that reflected an attitude toward contemporary life similar to that of the New York Beat writers who were their friends. Because of a small independent income and their interest in show business, publishing, and the arts, the Landesmans seemed, to many of their writer-acquaintances, similar to Gerald and Sara Murphy in the 1920s: they had a stable, if avant-garde, marriage; they had children and houses; they functioned in their different ways as artists; and they were always on the frontiers of the...