Background
He attended Trinity Hall School in Washington, Pa., and later worked on Pittsburgh newspapers. In collaboration with another American dramatist, George S. Kaufman, Connelly wrote Dulcy (1921), a clever satire on a well-meaning but trite-minded person; To the Ladies (1922), a counterpart of Sir James Barrie's What Every Woman Knows--that the wife is the secret of her husband's success; Merton of the Movies (1922); The Deep Tangled Wildwood (1923); and Beggar on Horseback (1924). Writing alone, he produced The Wisdom Tooth (1926) and the immensely successful The Green Pastures (1930), which gained him a Pulitzer Prize. The Green Pastures, based on Roark Bradford's Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun, is a sympathetic, amusing, imaginative account of the black American. Other Connelly dramas include The Farmer Takes a Wife (1934), The Traveler (1939), The Flowers of Virtue (1942), and Hunter's Moon (1958). Connelly taught at Yale University's school of drama (1947-1950) and was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters from 1953 to 1956. In 1965 he published the novel A Souvenir From Qam. His memoirs, Voices Offstage, appeared in 1968. Connelly died in New York City, Dec. 21, 1980.