About Robert E. Sherwood
Robert Emmet Sherwood (April 4, 1896 – November 14, 1955) was an American playwright and screenwriter. He is the author of Waterloo Bridge, Idiot's Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, There Shall Be No Night, and The Best Years of Our Lives. He was a screenwriter on the adapted films Rebecca and The Bishop's Wife. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1936, 1939, 1941), an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (1947) and a Pulitzer Prize for Biography (1949). == Early life and family == Born in 1896 in New Rochelle, New York, Robert was a son of Arthur Murray Sherwood, a rich stockbroker who co-founded The Harvard Lampoon while in college, and his wife, the former Rosina Emmet, a highly accomplished illustrator and portrait painter known as Rosina E. Sherwood. His paternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood, was an author and social leader. He was a great-great-grandson of the former New York State Attorney General Thomas Addis Emmet and a great-grandnephew of the Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, who was executed for high treason after leading the Irish rebellion of 1803, one of a series of attempts to dislodge British rule in Ireland, in 1803. His relatives also included three other notable American portrait artists: his aunts, Lydia Field Emmet and Jane Emmet de Glehn, and his first cousin, once removed, Ellen Emmet Rand. Sherwood was educated at Fay School, Milton Academy and then Harvard University from 1914 to 1917. Sherwood left Harvard to enlist in the 42nd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, after the United States Army rejected him as being too tall.
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