George Simon Kaufman (Born Pittsburg, Pa - 16 November, 1889: Died New York 2 June, 1961) American journalist, director, producer and dramatist.

George S. Kaufman, playwright, screenwriter, director, and producer of stage plays, was known as “the great collaborator.” His collaborative efforts won him the Pulitzer Prize twice. Of Thee I Sing, written with Morris Ryskind, George Gershwin, and Ira Gershwin, became the first musical ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. You Can’t Take It with You, which he wrote with Moss Hart, earned him his second Pulitzer Prize.

Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1889. He moved with his family, first to Paterson, New Jersey, and then to New York City where he began earning a living as a wholesale ribbon salesman, after a few months of fruitless law-study.

His contributions of quips and humorous verse to the notable newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams led to his being guided by Adams into a job writing a column of his own, and this in turn led to his becoming drama editor of the New York Times. Adams and Kaufman were leaders in the clique called the Algonquin Roundtable (of which Patrick Dennis's Auntie Mame was fictitiously said to have been an ornamental member).

As drama editor of the Times, Kaufman was at the busiest crossroads of the theatrical world, and he soon began to tinker with writing plays of his own. The first two were failures, in 1918 and 1919, but he
achieved a smash hit with his third try, Dulcy. Here again he was indebted to Adams, since the play was based on a fictitious character named Dulcinea who frequently appeared in Adams’s column.

Dulcy was written in collaboration with Marc Connelly. The Kaufman and Connelly partnership, thus established, resulted in seven more plays by 1924, five of them hits, making them the greatest playwriting team of the time.

From then on, Kaufman was America’s most collaborating playwright. With sixteen different partners he achieved a tremendous output that was a major contribution to American theatrical history. He had a hand in writing forty-four plays and musicals. He directed twenty-two of these, plus sixteen written by others. Inasmuch as an extraordinary proportion of these attractions were big hits (18 of those he wrote ran more than 200 performances on Broadway) his prodigious activity made him a big fortune—put him among the biggest money-makers in the history of the American theatre, and certainly left a heritage in the American theatre that will not soon be forgotten.

At the time of Kaufman’s death in June 1961, Moss Hart, who had collaborated with him on eight plays, said at his funeral: “No history of these forty years in the American theatre can be written without George S. Kaufman’s name and influence on it looming large and clear.”