With the outbreak of World War I, he (like many other high school students) finished Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium with a facilitated "emergency" Abitur and volunteered for military service.

His first drama, Kreuzweg (1921), fell flat and was delisted after only three performances, and when he was chosen as dramatic adviser at the theatre of Kiel, he lost his new job after his first, controversial staging of Terence's The Eunuch.

After another failure with his second drama, Pankraz erwacht oder Die Hinterwäldler, he finally had a public success with the rustic comedy Der fröhliche Weinberg (The Merry Vineyard) in 1925, written in his local Mainz-Frankfurt dialect.

[3] Also in 1925, Zuckmayer married the Austrian actress Alice Herdan [de], and they bought a house in Henndorf, near Salzburg, in Austria.

[citation needed] In 1929, he wrote the script for the movie Der blaue Engel (starring Marlene Dietrich), based on the novel Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann.

[citation needed] In 1943–44, Zuckmayer wrote "character portraits" of actors, writers, and other artists in Germany for the Office of Strategic Services, evaluating their involvement with the Nazi regime.

He also wrote the screenplay for Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach, the German-language version of Otto Preminger's 1953 film The Moon is Blue.

Having shuttled back and forth between the U.S. and Europe for several years, the Zuckmayers left the U.S. in 1958 and settled in Saas Fee in the Valais in Switzerland.

In 1966, he became a Swiss citizen, and published his memoirs, titled Als wär's ein Stück von mir[5] ("A part of myself").