Arthur Kober

Humorist Arthur Kober rose to fame with a series of New Yorker magazine articles set in the Bronx. Kober was particularly adept at capturing the unique speech patterns of his Jewish-American friends and relatives, as exemplified by his fictional creation Bella Gross, the heroine of his magazine essays and the 1935 novel Thunder Over the Bronx. His best-remembered work was the 1937 Broadway hit Having Wonderful Time, a colorfully risque comedy set in a Jewish Catskills resort; the play was cleaned up and de-ethnicized by Hollywood in 1938, and a decade later re-emerged as the stage musical Wish You Were Here. An occasional Hollywood contributor from 1931 onward, Arthur Kober contributed to the screenplays of such comedies as Hollywood Party (1934) and Palooka (1934), and worked on the adaptations of such Broadway productions as Up Pops the Devil (1931) and The Little Foxes (1941).