Arthur Kober was born in Brody, Austria-Hungary (now Poland) in 1900, to Adolph M. Kober (1872-1929) and Tillie Kober (1878-1943). The family, including Arthur and William (b. 1902), arrived in New York from Rotterdam in July 1903, aboard the S.S. Rendom. They settled in the Bronx, where his sisters, Kate (b. 1904) and Mildred (b. 1910) and brother, Morris (b. 1907) were born. At the age of fifteen Arthur left high school and began working at a series of jobs in a real estate office, a corset company, and as a secretary to Grenville Kleiser, an author of books on public speaking. During the summer of 1922 Kober worked as a bellboy on the ship S.S. Colombia. He came in contact with the theater as a reviewer of vaudeville shows for Theater World magazine. In 1925 he produced the Henry Meyer play, Me, which was a failure. He then became a press agent publicizing such Broadway productions as Artists and Models, Strike Up the Band, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Green Pastures (1930), by Marc Connelly. Kober shared an office with Herman Shumlin when the two worked as press agents for Jed Harris, a noted theatrical producer.
On December 31, 1925, Kober married Lillian Hellman, like himself a writer. During their marriage Kober began his career as a motion picture script writer in Hollywood. He wrote comedies and detective stories for Charles Ruggles, Mary Boland, Carole Lombard, Victor McLaglan, Stuart Erwin, ZaZu Pitts, Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny, George Burns, Gracie Allen, and Martha Raye. At the same time, Hellman was trying to establish her own career. Although the couple's long separations and career conflicts eventually resulted in a divorce in 1930, they remained the best of friends. Kober relied on Hellman's advice and common sense throughout his life, and Hellman became very close to Kober's second wife, her parents, and Kober's daughter.
Kober's greatest successes were as a short story writer. His accounts of Ma, Pa, and daughter Bella Gross were a New Yorker mainstay in the 1930's and 1940's. They were followed by the stories of Hollywood agent Benny Greenspan, also published in the New Yorker. These short stories were collected and published with others as Thunder Over the Bronx (1935), Pardon Me for Pointing (1939), My Dear Bella (1941), That Man Is Here Again (1945), Bella, Bella Kissed a Fella (1951), and Oooh, What You Said (1958). Many of Kober's characters were Jewish people who lived in the Bronx, as he had done for many years. Kober's characters spoke in a Bronx Yiddish-American dialect, and displayed the author's keen sympathy for and understanding of the people he wrote about, although some criticized him for stereotyping Jewish people.
In 1937, Marc Connelly produced Kober's play Having Wonderful Time. Having Wonderful Time was made into a Ginger Rogers-Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. motion picture in 1938 and in 1952 was produced as the musical comedy, Wish You Were Here, co-authored by Kober and Joshua Logan, with music and lyrics by Harold Rome.
In 1941 Kober wrote additional dialogue and scenes for the film production of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, starring Bette Davis. On January 11, 1941, Kober married Margaret Frohnknecht (with Lillian Hellman as matron of honor). They had a daughter, Catherine. In 1947 Margaret Kober contracted multiple sclerosis, which caused her death on May 16, 1951. Many years later Kober married Bette Grayson.
Kober continued to write and publish during the 1950's and 1960's, although his Gross family and Benny Greenspan short stories were not as popular as they were twenty years earlier. During the 1960's he was again in Hollywood, where he wrote episodes for Harrigan and Son, Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons, and other shows.
In the early 1960's, Kober began a book of reminiscences, to be published by Doubleday and Co. Throughout his entire career as a writer, Kober often experienced writer's block, and writing his autobiography was a struggle. As he said in a letter of August 15, 1963, to David M. Knauf, Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, “I wrote finger-tied on the typewriter. I wrote with difficulty, with a full and profound sense of insecurity, and I wrote hating every minute of it.” About his autobiography, Kober wrote, “I hope the book will be published. My big hope, however, is that I will be able to finish it.” The book of reminiscences was apparently unfinished at his death in June 1975.
