Scope and arrangement
Microfilm copy of the papers of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright-director, George S. Kaufman, consisting primarily of correspondence, scripts, and biographical scrapbooks. The correspondence contains letters from Fred Allen, Winthrop Ames, George Arliss, Eleanor Belmont, Walter Damrosch, Joseph E. Davies, Robert H. Davis, Theodore Dreiser, James A. Farley, Arthur Hopkins, Otto Kahn, Groucho and Harpo Marx, Adolphe Menjou, William Saroyan, Alfred E. Smith, Henry L. Stimson, John Steinbeck, Booth Tarkington, Oswald Garrison Villard, William Allen White, Alexander Woollcott, and others. There are scripts (some annotated) for seventeen produced and unproduced titles for stage, screen, and television including THE BUTTER AND EGG MAN (1925), THE LATE GEORGE APLEY (1944), THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER (1939), and several other plays on which Kaufman collaborated with Marc Connelly, Ruth Goodman Goetz, Leueen MacGrath, Morrie Ryskind, Howard Teichmann, and other playwrights.|||The remainder of the collection consists of miscellany such as notes pertaining to OF THEE I SING (1931), and scrapbooks of clippings concerning DULCY (1921), THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER, THE SENATOR WAS DISCREET, and other productions, 1912-1939. One letter pertains to Howard Teichmann's biography of Kaufman.
The George S. Kaufman papers, [microform] is arranged in five series:
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Entirely incoming and quite fragmentary, although there are letters from many prominent individuals including Walter Damrosch, Adolph Menjou, Oswald Garrison Villard, Joseph E. Davies, John Steinbeck, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, William Saroyan, Booth Tarkington, and Alexander Woollcott. Of these, only the correspondence with Woollcott concerning his appearance as himself in The Man Who Came to Dinner is of biographical interest. The correspondence consists only as photostatic copies, and the location of the originals is unknown, although other evidence in the collection suggests they may have been sold at the time of Kaufman's death.