Robert Emmet Sherwood was an American playwright, editor, and screenwriter.
Background
Sherwood was born on April 4, 1896 in New Rochelle, New York, the son of Arthur Murray Sherwood, a rich stockbroker, and his wife, the former Rosina Emmet, a highly accomplished illustrator and portrait painter known as Rosina E. Sherwood. He was a great-great-grandson of the former New York State Attorney General Thomas Addis Emmet and a great-grandnephew of the Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, who was executed for high treason after leading an abortive rebellion against British rule in 1803. His relatives also included three other notable American portrait artists: his aunts, Lydia Field Emmet and Jane Emmet de Glehn, and his first cousin, once removed, Ellen Emmet Rand.
Education
Sherwood was educated at Fay School, Milton Academy and then Harvard University.
Career
Sherwood was drama editor of Vanity Fair in 1919-1920 and with his colleagues Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley found his way to the Algonquin Round Table, the centre of a New York literary coterie. Sherwood then worked as associate editor in 1920-1924 and editor in 1924-1928 of the humour magazine Life. His first play, The Road to Rome, criticizes the pointlessness of war, a recurring theme in many of his dramas. The heroes of The Petrified Forest and Idiot’s Delight begin as detached cynics but recognize their own bankruptcy and sacrifice themselves for their fellowmen. In Abe Lincoln in Illinois and There Shall Be No Night, in which his pacifist heroes decide to fight, Sherwood’s thesis is that only by losing his life for others can a man make his own life significant. In 1938 Sherwood formed, with Maxwell Anderson, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and S.N. Behrman, the Playwrights’ Company, which became a major producing company. The Lincoln play led to Sherwood’s introduction to Eleanor Roosevelt and ultimately to his working for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as speechwriter and adviser. Sherwood’s speechwriting did much to make ghostwriting for public figures a respectable practice. Between service as special assistant to the secretary of war in 1940 and to the secretary of the navy in 1945, Sherwood served as director of the overseas branch of the Office of War Information in 1941-1944. From his wartime association with Roosevelt came much of the material for "Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History."
On October 29, 1922 he married Mary Brandon, but they divorced in 1934. Then he married his second wife, Madeline Hurlock Connelly on June 15, 1935. They had one daughter.