Jerome Lawrence Schwartz (1915-2004)
The co-author of the script for both the play Auntie Mame and the subsequent musical Mame was born in Ohio and attended Ohio State University. After graduating, he moved to California to work in radio as a writer for CBS. He later moved to New York City where he met Robert E. Lee and, during World War II, they were among the founders of the Armed Forces Radio Service. He later taught playwriting at the University of Southern California, New York University and others. He suffered a stroke in 2002 died from its aftereffects in 2004.

Robert Edwin Lee (1918-1994)
Also an Ohioan, he graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University. He was working in advertising in New York where he met Jerome Lawrence.

Lawrence and Lee
Both are best known for their long and fruitful partnership as a writing team. Altogether they collaborated on 39 works. Their first great triumph was the 1955 play Inherit the Wind based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, but the next year in a complete change of pace, they wrote the play Auntie Mame based on the novel by Patrick Dennis. They later prepared both the movie and the musical adapted from this work. In addition to works for Broadway, they wrote radio dramas and television shows.

About their collaboration, Lawrence later wrote: "Almost if not all of our plays share the theme of the dignity of every individual mind, and that [is] mind's life-long battle against limitation and censorship." 

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Revised August 2011
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