Morrie Ryskind achieved fame as a prolific American dramatist, lyricist and writer off Broadway stage and Hollywood film productions from 1920 through 1945. With George S. Kaufman and Ira Gershwin, he received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for their political musical "Of thee I Sing." ~Blog by Renee Meyers
Morrie Ryskind
Pulitzer Prize Recipient in Drama. He received fame as a prolific American dramatist, lyricist and writer of Broadway-stage and Hollywood-film productions from 1927 to 1945. With George S. Kaufman and Ira Gershwin, he received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for their political musical "Of Thee I Sing", which was the first musical to receive the coveted award. For the Marx Brothers, he and Kaufman wrote both stage and screenplays, "The Coconuts" in 1929, which poked fun at the scandalous Florida land rush, and "Animal Crackers" in 1930. The talented pair continued with more pieces for the Marx Brothers, "A Night at the Opera" in 1935, which was selected by the American Film Institute as one of the Top 100 Comedies, and "Room Service" in 1938. He helped to make the Marx Brothers very wealthy. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the films "My Man Godfrey" in 1936 and "Stage Door" in 1937.
He collaborated in writing successful Broadway musicals alongside Howard Dietz with "Merry-Go-Round" in 1927, the Gershwin brothers with "Strike Up the Band" in 1930, and Irving Berlin with "Louisiana Purchase" in 1940, which poked fun at Governor Huey Long's politics. After these stage plays were adapted to film, they returned to the stage in the 21st century. Ryskind wrote only a few dramas, including "Penny Serenade" in 1941. Born the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who settled in Brooklyn, he was suspended from Columbia University in his senior year in the School of Journalism for being outspoken about the university's 43-year president and 1931 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Nicholos Butler.
After Butler's refusal to allow Russian author Ilya Tolstoy to speak on campus in 1917, he published an article calling Butler a "Czar Nicholas" in the humor magazine "Jester". As a member of the Socialist Party of America, this would be the first of many political stances that he would take in his lifetime, and as the years passed, with him turning from Left Wing to a Right Wing. In 1940, he wrote the campaign song for Republican US Presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie and protested the United States entering World War II. His last hands-on work for Hollywood was the 1946 adaptation of "Heartbeat". In 1947, he appeared before Senator Joseph McCathy's led House Committee on Un-American Activities as a friendly witness, but this halted his forty-year Hollywood career. During the McCarty era, he was among the eight defendants named in the slander suit brought my playwright, lawyer, and President of the Screenwriters Guild of Los Angeles from 1945 to 1947, Emmet Lavery, Sr. In August of 1951, Lavery was awarded $30,000 in victory.
With his colleague William F. Buckley, Jr., he helped found the "National Review", a conservative editorial magazine, in 1955. During the 1950s, he published articles in "The Freeman", a Libertarian magazine. He supported the American Council for Judaism since the organization's aim was to be a Jewish religion and not becoming a Zionist nation. Starting in 1960 for the next eleven years, he wrote a conservative column in the "Los Angeles Times". He became a member of the John Birch Society, an ultra-conservative, anti-Communist group. His autobiography, "I Shot an Elephant in My Pajamas: The Morrie Ryskind Story", which was published posthumously in 1994.
On December 19, 1929, he married Mary House, and the couple had a son and a daughter, who both had literary careers. He died from the complications of a stroke at age 84.
