Herman J. Mankiewicz

Mankiewicz was the erudite, acid-tongued son of a demanding German-immigrant schoolteacher, and he spent his life outrunning his own gifts. A foreign correspondent in Berlin and then a drama critic for the New York Times and The New Yorker, he was part of the Algonquin Round Table circle of wits before Hollywood money pulled him away.

At Paramount in the late 1920s he became a producer and a one-man recruiting office, wiring East Coast playwrights and journalists the promise of easy riches. He brought out Ben Hecht and many others, seeding the studios with the literary talent that would define the sound era. He produced and supervised some of the anarchic early Marx Brothers pictures, including Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, and had a hand in Duck Soup.

His genius was matched by a genius for self-sabotage. He drank heavily, gambled catastrophically, and could not resist insulting the powerful men who paid him, which kept him perpetually broke and perpetually rehired. His masterpiece came late and by a strange route: recuperating from a car accident, he built the screenplay for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, drawing on his own bitter acquaintance with the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst and Hearst's world. The authorship became a lifelong controversy, but Mankiewicz fought for and won screen credit, and in 1941 he shared the film's only Academy Award, for its screenplay. It was the one Oscar of his career.

He never had another triumph like it. The drinking worsened, the assignments thinned, and he watched his younger brother Joseph rise to become a celebrated writer-director while his own reputation curdled. He died in 1953 at fifty-five, his liver ruined. For decades he was remembered mainly as a cautionary tale, but the enduring stature of Kane has restored him as one of the essential and most quotable minds of his generation.