After a number of years of drudgery as a camp social director and small-time little theatre producer, Moss Hart emerged in the 1930s as one of America's leading Broadway playwrights. His talents were numerous, extending to acting, directing, and producing as well as writing an autobiography, Act One (1959), which both S. N. Behrman and Walter Kerr described as the best book on the theatre written in this century. But above all, he will be remembered for his light comedies, especially You Can't Take It With You (1936) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), both of which he wrote in collaboration with his mentor and later close friend, George S. Kaufman.

Hart was born on 24 October 1904, in a railroad flat on East 103rd Street in the Bronx. (After becoming an established playwright he would often tell friends that he was born on Fifth Avenue--the wrong end of it.) He...