Robert E. Sherwood — American Playwright & Screenwriter
A literary sketch of Sherwood seen through the eyes of John Mason Brown’s biography — The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood
Like many another, Robert E. Sherwood came back from the First World War a changed man, as John Mason Brown writes in his 1965 biography:
“ He was a troubled and uprooted young man. He was not only convalescing physically, he was convalescing from a war. Like hundreds of thousands of other young men, he was a different man, come back to a different country to start a different life. With difficulty he was adjusting himself to the lower-keyed realities of peace. For the first time he was confronted with the full meaning, to him and his family, of his father’s failure and retirement. Skene Wood was gone. So was the Lexington Avenue in which the Sherwoods had lived for thirteen years. So was the routine of going off to school or college which before the war had been part of his life. The question Sherwood faced, once he had recovered from his immediate past, was his future. He wanted to write and he needed a job.”
Having suffered from a gas attack in 1918, and fallen onto wooden spikes in a German trench, Sherwood, on his return to the US, made his way to New York for a medical check-up and the hoped for writing job. The medical went well, with Dr James Alexander (a noted lung…
