SOURCE: Lembke, Russell W. “The George S. Kaufman Plays as Social History.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 33, no. 3 (October 1947): 341-47.

In the following essay, Lembke argues that Kaufman's plays offer an important survey of the American social history of his time.

It is time that we took another look at the thirty-four plays written in the years between 1920 and 1946 which bear the name of George S. Kaufman as author or collaborator. They have been smugly passed over by drama critics; but as social history alone, as vivid pictures of the life, particularly the city life, of the times, they do not deserve such treatment. There is an economy, a consciously painstaking selectivity, in the technique of writing which is not only good but which can be identified as Mr. Kaufman's own. These plays form an important and an independent body of drama even though twenty or more collaborators...