[John] Kenyon Nicholson, playwright, screenwriter, and editor, was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, on May 21, 1894. He received a bachelor's degree from Wabash College in 1917. After serving as a second lieutenant in the Army during World War I, Nicholson practiced the craft of playwriting while he did press work with the Stuart Walker Company of Indianapolis, Indiana. During the 1920's he contributed short stories to magazines such as Smart Set and collaborated with his friend and roommate, S. N. Behrman, on plays such as Love Is Like That and Before You're Twenty-Five. Their collaborations in both short story and drama often were penned under the pseudonym “Paul Halvey.”
By January 1927, Nicholson had authored one of the outstanding hits of the 1926-1927 Broadway season, The Barker, which starred Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert. In 1930 he again won critical and popular acclaim with Torch Song, but perhaps the best known of his Broadway hits was Sailor, Beware!, which was written in 1922 in collaboration with Charles Robinson. They continued to collaborate successfully on a number of other plays including Swing Your Lady, The Flying Gerardos, and Apple of His Eye.
In addition to writing for the legitimate stage, Nicholson was also involved in other aspects of theatre and in several motion picture and radio productions. He wrote screenplays and screen adaptations for films such as Laughing Sinners, Skyline, Taxi, Thirteen Hours by Air, and Union Depot; adapted scripts for many of The Theatre Guild on the Air radio productions; directed the Bucks County Playhouse during its 1940-1941 season; served as producer for the radio program The Cavalcade of America in 1949; co-edited an anthology of plays titled The American Scene; and independently edited Hollywood Plays, One Act Plays for Stage and Study, and The Appleton Book of Short Plays.
