Philip Barry (Philip Jerome Quinn Barry) Biography

American dramatist, born in Rochester, New York, educated at Yale. Barry was a frail child whose early years of invalidism turned him into an avid reader, who developed a reputation for precocious wit. At Yale he won the Yale dramatic society prize for his first play, Autonomy. He enrolled in George Pierce Baker's famous ‘47 Workshop’ at Harvard, a workshop drama school for aspiring playwrights later attended by Eugene O'Neill. His next play, The Jilts, later renamed You and I (1923), was the first of his many Broadway successes in which the eternal conflict between the claims of art and mammon is enlivened by Barry's witty epigrammatic style. Thereafter Barry's career as a dramatist was marked by the high success of his comedies of marital and sexual difficulties, and the relative failure of his work when it reflected a dimension of experiential despair which often drew him to fantasy. His other plays include Paris Bound (1927), Holiday (1928), Hotel Universe (1930), Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931), and The Animal Kingdom (1932). Perhaps his greatest success was The Philadelphia Story (1939), which was later made into a film starring Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.