Marc Connelly (Marcus Cook Connelly) Biography

American dramatist, born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Connelly worked as a journalist before turning to the theatre. In collaboration with George S. Kaufman in the early 1920s, he produced a series of comedies with a mocking satirical edge such as Dulcy (1921), and Merton of the Movies (1922), a satire on Hollywood in which a simple-minded grocery clerk becomes a star. Connelly's major work is The Green Pastures (1930; Pulitzer Prize), a version of Roark Bradford's stories of the Afro-American conception of Old Testament history, which dramatizes episodes from the Creation to the Crucifixion enacted in a series of tableaux in a small Southern black church.