Biography

Playwright, screenwriter and author. Graduate from the University of Chicago, Guggenheim Fellow (1937-38), Sidney Howard Memorial Award winner and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Wrote several books on anthropology, notably the widely read bestsellers "African Genesis" and "The Territorial Imperative", which dealt with the origins of human behavior.

Thornton Wilder was his mentor.

Led tours of the Mayan exhibition at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.

Played piano in an Al Capone speakeasy.

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

Man beset by anarchy, banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn.

The hungry psyche has replaced the hungry belly.

We seek the sun. We pursue the wind. We attain the mountaintop and there, dusted with stars, we say to ourselves, Now I know why I was born.

Art is an adventure. When it ceases to be an adventure, it ceases to be art. Not all of us pursue the inaccessible landscapes of the twelve-tone scale, just as not all of us strive for inaccessible mountain-tops, or glory in storms at sea. But the human incidence is there. Could it be that these two impractical pursuits - of beauty and of adventure's embrace - are simply two differing profiles of the same uniquely human reality?