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N. RICHARD NASH was a prolific writer whose greatest stage hit, The Rainmaker, was turned into a film starring Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster, and later became a musical, 110 in the Shade. He also wrote the musicals The Happy Time and Wildcat, the latter starring Lucille Ball, and the screenplay for the film of Porgy and Bess. Sometimes compared to another specialist in rural drama, William Inge, Nash never ranked as highly in critical estimation as Inge or his other contemporaries Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, but was a considerable craftsman whose work ranged from verse plays to Hollywood melodramas.
Born Nathaniel Richard Nasbaum in 1913 in Philadelphia, he was raised in a rough area on the city's south side, where his father worked as a bookbinder. As a youth, he made money by fighting as a $10-a-match boxer. "I didn't get hurt too much," he said later, "but I always had a bloody nose." Attending the University of Philadelphia he studied English and Philosophy, and after graduating published two philosophical studies, The Athenian Spirit and The Wounds of Sparta.
When he switched to playwriting, success came almost immediately. His first play Parting at Imsdorf (1941) won the Maxwell Anderson Verse Drama award and led to his being offered a job teaching drama at Bryn Mawr College. In 1946 he had his first play on Broadway, The Second Best Bed, a comedy about Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway which he also directed, then he moved to Hollywood where he wrote two of the biggest hits of 1947.
With Arthur Sheekman at Paramount, he adapted Hugo Butler's original story for Welcome Stranger, which reunited Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald in roles remarkably similar to those they had played in the Oscar-winning Going My Way three years earlier. In the latter they had been priests with...