Sheldon Harnick

Sheldon Mayer Harnick (April 30, 1924 – June 23, 2023) was an American lyricist, songwriter, and book writer whose work for the Broadway stage earned him multiple Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Born in Chicago, Illinois, to Esther (Kanter) and Harry M. Harnick, a dentist, he grew up in the city's Portage Park neighborhood. He began playing the violin as a child and started composing while attending Carl Schurz High School. Following military service in the U.S. Army, he enrolled at the Northwestern University School of Music, earning a Bachelor of Music degree between 1946 and 1949, after which he performed with orchestras in the Chicago area before relocating to New York City.

In New York, Harnick wrote for musicals and revues and developed an early connection to the city's performance community. A college friendship with Charlotte Rae led to an encounter at the Village Vanguard that proved formative: lyricist Yip Harburg, one of Harnick's idols, heard Rae performing one of his songs and attended the show. Harburg praised Harnick's writing and advised him to collaborate with many different composers and to focus on character and comic songs rather than ballads. Harnick's composition "The Merry Minuet" was later popularized by The Kingston Trio. His early Broadway contributions included material for New Faces of 1952 and Shangri-La (1956).

Around 1956, Harnick met composer Jerry Bock, beginning a partnership that would define his career. Their first collaboration, The Body Beautiful, opened in 1958 and ran for only 60 performances. Their next show, Fiorello!, opened in 1959, ran for 795 performances, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and received the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1960 — a year in which both Fiorello! and The Sound of Music tied for that honor. Harnick, Bock, and book writer Jerome Weidman shared the Pulitzer. The pair followed with Tenderloin (1960), She Loves Me (1963), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964), which became one of the most celebrated musicals in Broadway history. Fiddler earned Harnick and Bock the 1965 Tony Awards for both Best Musical and Best Composer and Lyricist. Additional Bock-Harnick collaborations included The Apple Tree (1966) and The Rothschilds (1970). Harnick also contributed lyrics to Her First Roman (1968) when he and Bock were brought in to work on that production.

Beyond his work with Bock, Harnick collaborated with a wide range of composers and writers. He contributed lyrics for Portofino (1958) with Richard Ney, wrote lyrics for Rex (1976) with Richard Rodgers, and provided English lyrics for stage adaptations of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1979) with Michel Legrand and Cyrano: The Musical (1993). He worked with composer Joe Raposo on Alice in Wonderland (1975) and A Wonderful Life (1986), and with Mary Rodgers on Pinocchio (1973), which marked his Broadway appearance that year. He also wrote the book, lyrics, and music for Dragons, performed at Luna Stage in Montclair, New Jersey, in 2003, and co-wrote the book with Norton Juster for The Phantom Tollbooth, based on Juster's novel, which premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2007. His opera libretto Coyote Tales, with music by Henry Mollicone, received its world premiere at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City in March 1998. In 2004, he contributed one new lyric, "Topsy Turvy," to a revival of Fiddler on the Roof. In 2014, he released the album Sheldon Harnick: Hidden Treasures (1949–2013), drawn from his private collection of song demos and material cut from Broadway productions. In 2020, he worked on a musical adaptation of the Soviet play The Dragon by Evgeny Schwartz.

Harnick accumulated significant honors across his career. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972 and received its highest honor, the Johnny Mercer Award, in 1990. On May 19, 1984, he received the University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit. He and Bock were presented with the York Theatre Company's Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre at its 18th annual ceremony in 2009. He was honored at the Twenty-Sixth Annual William Inge Theatre Festival in Independence, Kansas, in 2007. In 2016, he received both the Drama League Award for Distinguished Achievement in Musical Theatre and the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. Northwestern University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2018.

In his personal life, Harnick married three times. His 1950 marriage to Mary Boatner was annulled in 1957. He was married to Elaine May from 1962 until their divorce in 1963. In 1965, he married Margery Grey, with whom he had two children. The couple lived in an apartment at The Beresford on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Harnick died on June 23, 2023, at the age of 99.