N. Richard Nash

Nathan Richard Nusbaum (June 8, 1913 – December 11, 2000), known as N. Richard Nash, was an American writer and dramatist best known for writing Broadway shows, including The Rainmaker.

Early life Nash was born Nathan Richard Nusbaum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania the only son and youngest child of S. L. Nusbaum, a bookbinder, and his wife Jenny (née Singer). He worked as a ten dollar per match boxer and graduated from South Philadelphia High School in 1930 before entering the University of Pennsylvania to study English and philosophy.

Career Nash published two books on philosophy, The Athenian Spirit and The Wounds of Sparta. Nash wrote his first play, Parting at Imsdorf, in 1940, which won the Maxwell Anderson Verse Drama Award. He next penned the Shakespearian-themed comedy The Second Best Bed, produced on Broadway in 1946. The highly acclaimed drama led to him writing more shows, including The Young and Fair (1948), See the Jaguar (1952, for which he won the International Drama Award in Cannes and the Prague Award), and The Rainmaker (1954, starring Geraldine Page; revived on Broadway in 1999). The Rainmaker, a full-length play, had originally been a The Philco Television Playhouse one-act 1953 television production. It was translated to over 40 languages and made into a 1956 Hollywood film starring Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn, and a 1982 full-length TV production. The play was made into a Broadway musical, 110 in the Shade. Here Come the Brides (1968–1970, 52 episodes) was a Screen Gems television series developed by Nash; Nash wrote the series pilot of the same name.

In the 1950s, Nash moved from New York to Hollywood to write the screenplay for The Rainmaker. However, it was the 1972 Broadway failure of Echoes (1972) and the novelization of a screenplay that led Nash to transition from writing screenplays to writing novels. Over the decades, there have multiple attempts to produce a movie of Cry Macho, including a feature starring Roy Scheider, which began initial production in Mexico in 1991, and one from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who originally planned to return to acting in 2011, after his time as Governor of California, with a film based on the Cry Macho novel that was eventually cancelled. The latest, and only successful, attempt to bring the story into the big screen, was announced in October 2020. The film, which was directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, was released in 2021 by Warner Bros. Pictures and HBO Max.

After selling Cry Macho, Nash began to write what he called "real novels" and discover that writing a novel was more flexible than writing a play and received much less criticism than writing a play.

Personal life In 1935, Nash married Helena Taylor, with whom he had one son, Christopher. They divorced in 1954. Nash was married to Janice Rule in 1955, but they divorced later that same year. Later that year, he married Katherine Copeland, aka Katherine Kaplan, with whom he had two daughters, Jennifer and Amanda.

Death Nash died in Manhattan on December 11, 2000, aged 87.

Work

Nonfiction The Wounds of Sparta The Athenian Spirit

Drama

The Second Best Bed (1946) See the Jaguar (1952) The Rainmaker (1954) Handful of Fire (1958)

Screenplays The Sainted Sisters (1948) The Vicious Years (1950) The Joker (1954) Top of the World (1955) Porgy and Bess (1959) Saravá Wildcat Between the Darkness and the Dawn (1985) The Touch Echoes Girls of Summer The Young and Fair

Novels Cry Macho (1975) East, Wind Rain The Last Magic Winter Blood Radiance Aphrodite's Cave Behold the Man The Wildwood (2000)

Poetry Absalom