Joseph Kramm was born September 30, 1907, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Shrike is Kramm's ninth play and the first to be published or produced. Kramm spent most of his time working on amateur theatricals while he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, which caused his grades to suffer. After enduring psychological intelligence tests and evaluations by psychiatrists to determine the cause of his poor grades, he came away with a critical view of the psychiatric field, a judgment that would reappear in The Shrike.