Noted director-critic Harold Clurman was born in New York City on September 18, 1901. He began his college education at Columbia University, then traveled to Europe to study. He graduated from the Sorbonne in 1923, and from 1923 to 1924 he studied with Jacques Copeau at the School of the Vieux-Colombier Theatre. Returning to America, he studied directing with Richard Boleslavsky at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York in 1927.
During the middle and late twenties he acted in several Theatre Guild productions, though by the end of the decade he and others had become dissatisfied with the Guild's operation. Together with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg he founded the Group Theatre in 1931. The Group presented some of the most exciting theater of the 1930s and introduced the playwright Clifford Odets to a large theater-going audience. For the Group Theatre Clurman directed Awake and Sing (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), Rocket to the Moon (1938), The Gentle People (1939), Night Music (1940), and Retreat to Pleasure (1940). In 1945 Clurman wrote the story of the Group Theatre, The Fervent Years.
In the early forties after the demise of the Group, Clurman worked as director-producer for RKO. Then he returned to New York and stage-directing. Among the productions he staged are: A Member of the Wedding (1950), The Autumn Garden (1951), Bus Stop (1955), Tiger at the Gates (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and A Shot in the Dark (1961).
Clurman was theater critic for The New Republic from 1949 to 1953, and from 1953 he has served as drama critic for The Nation.
