Beatrice Kaufman

Beatrice Bakrow Kaufman (January 20, 1895 – October 6, 1945) was an American editor, writer, and playwright. Though chiefly remembered as the wife of director, humorist, and playwright George S. Kaufman, she had a distinguished literary career of her own, and during the 1930s and '40s, was regarded as "one of the wittiest women in New York" who was "influential in shaping American taste and culture in the early twentieth century".

Kaufman was born Beatrice Bakrow in Rochester, New York, in 1895. Her parents, Julius and Sarah (Adler) Bakrow, were of German Jewish heritage. She had two brothers, Leonard and Julian. Although she was admitted to Wellesley College in 1913—a rare accomplishment, at the time, for a Jewish woman—she was expelled during her first year for breaking curfew. She transferred to the University of Rochester in 1914, but dropped out after one year. In 1917 she married George S. Kaufman, a theatre reporter for the New York Tribune, and an aspiring playwright; the couple moved to New York City, where they lived for the rest of her life.

In 1918, Kaufman began her career as an assistant to the press agent for silent movie actresses Natalie, Constance, and Norma Talmadge. In 1919, their daughter, Anne, was born. After a stint the following year as a play reader for Broadway producer Al Woods, Kaufman joined the publishing company Boni & Liveright. During her five years as head of its editorial department, she edited works by such important novelists, poets, and playwrights as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, e.e. cummings, John Steinbeck, Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes, and eventually, her husband. She edited Ernest Hemingway's first published work—a collection of short stories called In Our Time—and convinced her reluctant bosses to publish it.

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