Herman J. Mankiewicz

Herman Jacob Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles. He was also the first regular drama critic at The New Yorker. The Wizard of Oz, Man of the World, Dinner at Eight, Pride of the Yankees, and The Pride of St. Louis were among the films he wrote or worked on, besides Citizen Kane.

About Herman J. Mankiewicz in brief

Herman Jacob Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles. He was also the first regular drama critic at The New Yorker. His style of writing included a slick, satirical, and witty humor. The Wizard of Oz, Man of the World, Dinner at Eight, Pride of the Yankees, and The Pride of St. Louis were among the films he wrote or worked on, besides Citizen Kane. His parents were German Jewish immigrants. He married Sara Aaronson, of Baltimore, and had three children: Don, Frank, and Johanna. He died in New York City in 1989, at the age of 89. He is buried in Mount Sinai Cemetery, New York, with his wife Sara and their three children, including a son and daughter-in-law, who died in 2011 in a car crash in Los Angeles. He also is survived by his wife, Sara, and two sons, Don and Frank, as well as a daughter, Johanna Davis, who later became a playwright and novelist. He had a son, Donald, who became a screenwriter and later a director. He worked as a reporter for The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post, and numerous other magazines. His writing attracted the notice of film producer Walter Wanger, who offered him a motion-picture contract and he soon moved to Hollywood. He later became the head of Paramount’s scenario department and was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers who wrote the scenario for many of the big Hollywood blockbusters of the 1920s and 1930s.

He has been described as a “gifted, prodigious writer’” and “a key linking figure in just the kind of movies I remember best from the twenties and thirties.” He was known as a. “bookish, introspective child” who, despite his intelligence, was never able to win approval from his demanding father who was known to belittle his achievements. His father, Franz, was born in Berlin and emigrated to the U.S. from Hamburg in 1892. He became a flying cadet with the United States Army in 1917, and, in 1918, a private first class with the Marines, A. E. F. ‘E.F.’ ‘Mankiewicz’. He went on to work as a foreign correspondent in Berlin for the Chicago Tribune. He collaborated with George Kaufman on a play, The Good Fellows, and with Marc Connelly on Borneo. From 1923 to 1926, he was up in the drama department in the New Yorker backing up George S. Kaufman in the theatre department and soon after, he became the first. regular theatre critic for the paper. In 1925 he was a head of the scenario department at Paramount and by the end of the year he was head of its scenario department.

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