Mosel, Tad 1922-2008 (George Ault Mosel, Jr.)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born May 1, 1922, in Steubenville, OH; died of cancer, August 24, 2008, in Concord, NH. Television writer, playwright, and biographer. Mosel won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his Broadway play All the Way Home (1960), an adaptation of the autobiographical novel A Death in the Family by James Agee. The play almost foundered, despite a cast that included Colleen Dewhurst and Lillian Gish, until a positive mention on Ed Sullivan's television show revived the production and allowed it a second chance. The play was originally intended for television, and that is the medium in which Mosel experienced his greatest success. He wrote television plays in the early days of the medium, when live broadcasts on respected anthology series featuring well-known actors lured audiences away from radio. An example is The Petrified Forest, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in what would be their last joint performance, which was broadcast by Producers' Showcase in 1955. He wrote dozens of other scripts, which aired on series like Studio One, Playhouse 90, and Omnibus. Critics called television the ideal medium for a playwright who favored intimate stories about family relationships or other close encounters. All the Way Home, for example, explores the devastating impact on a family when the father is killed in a car crash in 1915. The Petrified Forest depicts a tense hostage crisis set in a remote café in the "petrified forest" area of Arizona in the 1930s. A live broadcast did not have a long shelf life in those days before videotape, so Mosel's television work was immortalized, if at all, in collections like Other People's Houses: Six Television Plays (1956). He did write the occasional screenplay, such as Up the Down Staircase (1967) but always returned to television or the stage. Mosel worked briefly as an airline clerk, but from childhood he was drawn to the theater. He claimed he had been inspired as a teenager by watching a performance by actress Katherine Cornell (sometimes credited as Katharine Cornell). Many years later he coauthored the biography Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katherine Cornell (1978).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2008, p. B13.

New York Times, August 26, 2008, p. C11.