Jerome was born July 14, 1915, in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Glenville High School in Cleveland in 1933, Lawrence went on to study at Ohio State University. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1937. Between 1937 and 1939, Lawrence was a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles. Robert Edwin Lee was born on October 15, 1918, in Elyria, Ohio, and graduated from Elyria High School in 1935. He went on to study at Northwestern University in Chicago in 1934 before transferring to Ohio Wesleyan, where he was a student from 1935 to 1937. During World War II, Lawrence served as a consultant to the Secretary of War and later as an Army correspondent in North Africa and Italy. Lee was similarly appointed Expert Consultant to the Secretary of War in 1942. He also served in the USAF from 1943 to 1944, during which time he and Lawrence co-founded Armed Forces Radio. Working together on Armed Forces Radio, Lawrence and Lee produced the official Army-Navy radio programs for D-Day, VE-Day, and VJ-Day. After the war and throughout their careers, they continued to write radio programs for CBS, including the series Columbia Workshop. They also co-wrote radio plays, including The Unexpected (1951), Song of Norway (1957), Shangri-La (1960), a radio version of Inherit the Wind (1965), and Lincoln the Unwilling Warrior (1974). Lee was awarded a Peabody Ward for a U.N. radio series in 1948. From the late 1940s onward, Lawrence and Lee collaborated on the writing of many plays that would come to be seen as standards of American drama. Their first theatrical collaboration was writing the book for Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’!, which premiered at the Adelphi Theatre in New York in 1948. Their second play, Inherit the Wind, was not produced on Broadway until 1955. Their agent, Harold Freedman, had been shopping the play around for nearly a year when Dallas producer Margo Jones agreed to give the play a try-out in Texas. The production opened at Theatre ’55 on January 10, 1955. Its success in Dallas led to the play’s opening at the National Theatre in New York on April 21, 1955. Inherit the Wind earned Lawrence and Lee numerous awards in the year after its production. The play won the Donaldson Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Variety New York Drama Critics Poll Award, and the Critics Award for Best Foreign Play, and was nominated for a Tony Award. After Inherit the Wind, the two collaborated with James Hilton to adapt Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon, as the book and lyrics to the musical Shangri-La, which opened at the Winter Garden in New York in 1956. Over the next few years Lawrence and Lee wrote the plays Auntie Mame (1956), The Gang’s All Here (1959), A Call On Kuprin (1961), the book to the musical Mame (1966), Dear World (1969), The Incomparable Max (1969), which Lawrence directed, The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail (1971), Jabberwock (1972), Diamond Orchid (1965), based on the Henry James book, and Laugh Makers (1952). In 1990, Lawrence and Lee were named Fellows of American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. That same year, their final collaboration, Whisper in the Mind, was produced at Arizona State University and, in 1994, at the Missouri Repertory Theatre. On July 8, 1994, Lee died in Los Angeles. Lawrence continued to write and supervise productions of his plays from his Malibu home. He is the author of Actor: The Life and Times of Paul Muni, which has been called one of the best theater biographies of the century.