(Though known for his sophisticated comedies and worldly characters, Behrman fondly dramatized his family-centered, impoverished childhood in one of his last plays, the 1958 The Cold Wind And The Warm, an autobiographical drama starring Eli Wallach, Maureen Stapleton, and Morris Carnovsky.

A schoolmate and intimate friend, Daniel Asher, brought him to the theater when he was eleven to see Devil's Island, inspiring in him a love of the stage.

In the New York Tribune nineteen years later, he would title an essay "Baker's Last Drama Lecture: From Aeschylus to Behrman," in tribute to his famous student.

Living in a cold-water flat in Manhattan, Behrman worked in his twenties as a book reviewer, newspaper interviewer, and press agent, collaborated on three undistinguished plays, and published short stories in several magazines, including The Smart Set, the monthly edited by H.L.

[8] From the late 1920s through the 1940s, S. N. Behrman was considered one of Broadway's leading authors of "high comedy," was often produced by the famous Theatre Guild, and wrote for such stars as Ina Claire, Katharine Cornell, Jane Cowl, and the acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who became his good friends.

A well-read man of wide culture, he also adapted plays by Jean Giraudoux and Marcel Achard and "Jane," a short story by his good friend W. Somerset Maugham.

With Sonya Levien, he co-wrote the screen play for the 1930 film version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, starring Charles Farrell and Rose Hobart.

The protagonist of Biography laments a political landscape that is divided between left- and right-wing extremes, leaving little space for a tolerant, humane middle ground.

Behrman's columns for The New Yorker included profiles of such notable figures as composer George Gershwin, Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and entertainer Eddie Cantor as well as longer pieces that became highly regarded biographies of writer and dandy Max Beerbohm and art dealer Joseph Duveen.

Biography tells the story of Marion Froude, a noted portrait painter, who has been prevailed upon by an abrasive leftwing publisher, Richard Kurt, to write her serialized memoirs for his magazine.

A liberal woman who has painted both Roman Catholic prelates and Lenin himself, Marion must choose (she destroys her manuscript in the end), but is ultimately alienated by both Kurt's proletarian rigidity and Leander's smug conservatism.

[16] End of Summer is about three women of different generations and values: forty-ish Leonie Frothingham, her elderly mother, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Paula.

Other characters, including a young man romantically attached to Paula and a Russian emigre-friend of the family, visit the house and talk about their lives, aspirations, and political leanings.

One writer described End of Summer as "a Chekhovian play which emphasizes the disappearance or demise of an old, conservative order [represented by Leonie's mother] and the emergence of the new, more radical way of American life."

Published eighteen years after his first memoir, The Worcester Account, it is a collection of autobiographical essays and sketches culled from the sixty volumes of diaries Behrman had been keeping since his time at Harvard in 1915.

"An odd quirk of destiny has put a great many people in my way," he wrote in a significant understatement, declaring that his purpose in the book was to "revive their society" and the vibrant times they had shared.

The cast of characters in People in a Diary gives an idea of the breadth and depth of Behrman's life: e.g., Greta Garbo, Laurence Olivier, Louis B. Mayer, Jean Giradoux, Somerset Maugham, Eugene O'Neill, Noël Coward, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Berenson, the Gershwins, and the Marx Brothers.

The book also contains some biting observations about the direction modern America had taken in the 1960s as it waged war in Vietnam and became more obsessed with money and imperial ambitions.

In Atkinson's view, this "short, rounded, merry, owlish-looking...marvelously erudite and civilized" man was far more than merely a writer of Broadway entertainments.