Throughout the 1940s, Norman Corwin elevated the fledgling medium of live broadcast radio theatre to its artistic zenith in America. Regarded as radio's poet laureate by fans and contemporaries, Corwin's earnest prosody adapted naturally and easily to radio broadcast, and he wielded the medium to its utmost, celebrating the American citizen during World War II, elucidating the dread of war with a journalist's precision, impugning despotism, or merely lending credence to the vox populi with his intellectual, imaginative use of words, music, and dramatic interplay. Corwin's dramatic use of radio defined an era and an art form. Though Corwin was revered and admired during radio's Golden Age, his popularity ultimately paralleled that of network radio.

Born May 3, 1910, in Boston, Massachusetts, Norman Lewis Corwin was the third of four children in a Jewish Russian-Hungarian family. He was a prankster and a storyteller, and his grades...