Philip Jerome Quinn Barry (June 18, 1896 – December 3, 1949) was an American dramatist best known for his plays Holiday (1928) and The Philadelphia Story (1939), which were both made into films starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Because of his poor eyesight, Barry was rejected for military service during World War I, but he eventually found a wartime job deciphering cables at the U.S. Embassy in London and left Yale to assume his duties.

Ellen lived in New York while he remained in Cambridge, and there he wrote The Jilts, which reflected his own concern that marital obligations might thwart an artistic career and force him into the business world.

Theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote "If [his story of a businessman who gives up art for the sake of money and family] did not make Barry exactly a revolutionary, it made him a dissenter from the materialistic mythology of America.

In a Garden contains echoes of Luigi Pirandello and in its ending alludes to the famous final scene that concludes Ibsen's A Doll's House when Nora Helmer leaves her unsympathetic husband Torvald.

as a precursor to Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, the play follows a group of proud street cleaners at the turn of the twentieth century; its theme is the increasing mechanization of life.

Archie Inch, the protagonist, is caught between the "White Wings" (the men who clean up after horse-drawn carriages) and his sweetheart Mary Todd, who loves her father and the automobiles he designs which are a threat to the older way of life.

In comparison to other plays of that era about the modern work force, such as Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and Dynamo, Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, and the dramas of Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser, Barry's was taken less seriously.

He lived in luxury on the Riviera for a year in a circle that included Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Cole Porter, and Archibald MacLeish, and began work on two new plays.

The writing was cited as being both grandiose and mundane, and the casting (with Yiddish actor Jacob Ben-Ami as John and British actress Constance Collier as Herodias) was strongly criticized.

Holiday (1928), a comedy which ran for 230 performances, was far more popular with critics and audiences and is considered to be one of Barry's best depictions of an affluent American family and its confrontation with less convention-bound values.

Set in a villa in southern France based on the home of the famous expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy, Hotel Universe tells the story of six unhappy characters in search of meaning, if not an author, though in effect they find one in Stephen Field, the aging invalid whose lonely daughter, Ann, they have all come to visit.

[18] Though remembered today for his vintage "comedies of manners" playfully skewering the rich and fashionable, Barry (a practicing Roman Catholic whose sister was a nun) wrote many serious dramas, often on religious themes.

[19] Brooks Atkinson, noting this dichotomy between the successful, high-living Broadway playwright of light fare and the serious-minded writer, wrote of Barry that, at heart, "[he] liked the role of prophet; he was attracted to moralistic themes about mankind.

"[20] His 1927 play John is a New Testament story, and Barry described his 1938 allegory Here Come the Clowns as a study of "the battle with evil" in which his hero, Clancy, "at last finds God in the will of man."

)[22] Barry's best-known, most frequently revived work is The Philadelphia Story (1939), which was made into a 1940 film starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.

Hepburn, a close friend of Barry, had appeared in the play on Broadway, but she had doubts about its commercial possibilities[23] and, proven wrong by its box-office success, bought the movie rights with the help of her ex-boyfriend Howard Hughes.