Driving Miss Daisy was the first play that Alfred Uhry wrote and he based it on people he had known growing up in the South, particularly his grandmother and her driver. The play's original schedule called for it to run for five weeks at Playwrights Horizon, a New York nonprofit theater that seated an audience of seventy-four. When the five-week run was up, the play was extended another five weeks, and when that was up, the play moved to a bigger theater. A year and a half later, the show was still playing in New York, and also around the country. Uhry also won the Pulitzer Prize.

Audiences and critics immediately responded to the play, even when its premise seemed distinctly unpromising. In American Theatre, Don Shewey recalls his experience.

I remember trudging upstairs ... to see a play that sounded distinctly unpromising. It was about gads...