At age 19, he secured a job as an announcer at KPO Radio in San Francisco, California, marrying Mildred Legaye in 1925.
His unpublished play Glory Lane, was premiered in January 1935, at the Golden Bough Playhouse in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California by Ralph Bell.
He served with Montgomery's Eighth Army in Egypt and subsequently saw action in India and Burma where the ideas for his next play The Hasty Heart were germinated.
Patrick completed the play on the ship that returned him to the U.S. after the war, and it proved a great commercial success, being adapted for the screen in 1949, with Ronald Reagan as the star and for TV in 1983.
His next two plays, The Curious Savage (1950) and Lo and Behold (1951), fared less well, but it was his 1953 stage adaptation of Vern J. Sneider's novel The Teahouse of the August Moon that marked the height of his fame, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for drama.