Paul Romaine Osborn, outstanding American writer of plays, screenplays, and adaptations, was born in Evansville, Indiana, in 1901. The son of Edward Saxon and Bertha Judson Osborn, he moved a year later to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he spent his boyhood. He enrolled at Kalamazoo College in 1919, but transferred the following year to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he received his B.A. in psychology in 1923. He remained an additional year to earn an A.M. in English, whereupon he joined the faculty there as an instructor in English for an additional two years.
As an undergraduate, Osborn had originally planned to study engineering, but the literary influences of the then poet-in-residence, Robert Frost, who was also to become a life-long friend of Osborn, caused him to change direction. As early as 1920 he became involved in the organization of a group of amateur actors called the Dodos, who reached their peak producing plays commercially in the years 1923-1926. This last year the group went into debt and ceased practical existence, but the Dodos imparted to Osborn his dramatic impetus, for during his Christmas vacation in 1925 he began work on his own first commercially successful play, Hotbed, which Brock Pemberton eventually produced on Broadway in 1928.
Before his arrival in New York, however, Osborn enrolled for two years, 1926-1927, at Workshop 47, Professor George Pierce Baker's famous drama school at Yale. Out of his work there came another successful play, produced later, The Vinegar Tree. Critical acclaim toward this work, as well as the earlier Hotbed, assured him of a promising career, and the production of such hits as On Borrowed Time in 1938 and Mornings at Seven, generally recognized as his finest original work, secured his reputation as one of the great playwrights of modern times.
Throughout his career, some authorities have consistently maintained that Osborn's talents are better suited to the technique of adaptation. His successes here, both on the stage and on the screen, certainly have been many, including The Young in Heart, his first screenplay, produced in 1938; A Bell for Adano; Point of No Return; Madame Curie; The Old Man and the Sea; The Yearling; and Sayonara, nominated for an Academy Award.
In the field of original screenplays, on which much of his later fame rests, Osborn has had some outstanding successes in South Pacific, his only musical; East of Eden, nominated for another Academy Award; The World of Suzie Wong; and Wild River. Osborn has collaborated with such outstanding Broadway and Hollywood producers as Elia Kazan, Joshua Logan, David O. Selznick, Leland Hayward, Brock Pemberton, and Kermit Bloomgarden.
In 1960, Osborn was invited by Weimer K. Hicks, president of Kalamazoo College, to receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature, for his “achievements as a playwright” and in light of the “renascence of interest in the performing arts.”
In 1928, Osborn married Florence Lauchheim of New York, whom he divorced ten years later. On May 10, 1939, he married Millicent Green, a former actress.
