Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

Born in Cleveland and educated at Ohio State and UCLA, Jerome Lawrence Schwartz (who dropped his last name upon embarking on a professional career), began work as a newspaper and radio writer, then teamed up with Robert E. Lee (no relation to the Civil War general, and himself an Ohio native, educated at Ohio Wesleyan) to write radio plays. Their first collaboration for the stage, Inherit the Wind, earned them a great deal of notoriety, and made for them a reputation as playwrights of a political bent—intent on writing about current political issues in the US, including the relationship between science and belief, between political power and the right to speak one’s mind. Lawrence and Lee went on to found the American Playwrights’ Theatre, and to write another blockbuster, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, along with thirty-odd other collaborative plays, many of them still performed today, and reinterpreted to highlight other, current debates in American society.