He won third prize and $5 for an essay, "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport". A year later, he published "The Vengeance of Nitocris". It was nine years later when his first publicly performed play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, was produced in Memphis; in many respects this would be the beginning of his literary and stage career. The next year he became associated with the Mummers, a lively St. Louis theatre group. By 1939, he had dropped Thomas Lanier completely which allowed him to become more than just a local playwright. During this year, he lied about his age in order to submit a series of plays to the Group Theatre. From this he got himself an agent, Audrey Wood. She procured him a Rockefeller Fellowship, which allowed him to work comfortably without the worries of money. His first published plays appeared in The Best Plays in 1940,41,42,44, and
He won third prize and $5 for an essay, "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport". A year later, he published "The Vengeance of Nitocris". It was nine years later when his first publicly performed play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, was produced in Memphis; in many respects this would be the beginning of his literary and stage career. The next year he became associated with the Mummers, a lively St. Louis theatre group. By 1939, he had dropped Thomas Lanier completely which allowed him to become more than just a local playwright. During this year, he lied about his age in order to submit a series of plays to the Group Theatre. From this he got himself an agent, Audrey Wood. She procured him a Rockefeller Fellowship, which allowed him to work comfortably without the worries of money. His first published plays appeared in The Best Plays in 1940,41,42,44, and