Robert Sherwood

Robert Sherwood. , Robert Emmet Sherwood was a film critic, Playwright and screenwriter. He was born in New Rochelle, New York on April 4, 1896 and lived at 18 Neptune Place., A colleague of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker at Vanity Fair Magazine, Sherwood was a founding member of the famed Algonquin Round Table , a group of writers who met monthly at the Algonquin Room bar in New York City. He stood six feet eight inches tall, and Dorothy Parker once commented that when she would walk down the street with him and six-foot-tall Robert Benchley, they looked like "a walking pipe organ.", His 1930 play Waterloo Bridge was adapted into a critically acclaimed 1940 film starring Vivian Leigh and Robert Taylor. The Petrified Forest (1935) was adapted into the classic film starring Bette Davis, Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart. His 1936 play, Idiot's Delight, won the Pulitzer Prize. He won the Pulitzer Prize again in 1938 for Abe Lincoln in Illinois and, in 1940, he won his third Pulitzer for There Shall Be No Night. Only Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama more times than Robert Sherwood with four wins., His screenwriting credits include The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon; Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), adapted from his play, with Raymond Massey reprising his stage roles; and Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. In 1947, Sherwood won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), starring Frederic March, Dana Andrews and Myrna Loy., During World War II he became a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt and coined the phrase "arsenal of democracy." He also served as Director of the Office of War Information. In 1949, he won the Pulitzer Prize again, this time for biography, for his memoir Roosevelt and Hopkins., He once admitted, "The trouble with me is that I start with a big message and end up with nothing but good entertainment."