Tad Mosel

Tad Mosel, born George Ault Mosel, Jr. on May 1, 1922, in Steubenville, Ohio, was an American playwright, book writer, and one of the foremost dramatists working in the hour-long teleplay format during the golden age of live television in the 1950s. He died on August 24, 2008, at the age of 86. His parents were George Ault Mosel, Sr. and Margaret Norman, and the family was raised Presbyterian. When Mosel was eight years old, his father's wholesale grocery business collapsed in the wake of the stock market crash, prompting a move to the suburbs of New York City. By 1931, his father had established a successful advertising company in New York, and Mosel spent his formative years in Larchmont and New Rochelle, New York. His interest in theater took root in 1936 after he saw Katharine Cornell perform in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan on Broadway.

Mosel attended the Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Massachusetts, for one year before graduating from New Rochelle High School. He enrolled at Amherst College but left following the attack on Pearl Harbor to enlist in the Army Air Force, serving as a Sergeant in the U.S. Air Force Weather Service from 1943 to 1946, including a year as a weather observer in the South Pacific. After the war, he completed his degree at Amherst and pursued graduate studies at the Yale Drama School, followed by a Master's degree at Columbia University. During this period he was simultaneously writing plays and auditioning as an actor.

His Broadway career began in 1949, when he appeared in the farce At War with the Army in a non-speaking role as a confused private. That same year, his first teleplay was performed on Chevrolet Tele-Theater. Through the early 1950s, Mosel became a prominent scriptwriter for live television dramas, contributing six teleplays to Goodyear Television Playhouse between 1953 and 1954, two to Medallion Theatre during the same period, and four to Playhouse 90 between 1957 and 1959. He also wrote for The Philco Television Playhouse, Producers' Showcase, and Studio One. His 1953 Philco Television Playhouse drama The Haven, about a troubled marriage, featured actress Eileen Heckart and led to a lasting friendship; Mosel subsequently wrote several scripts specifically for Heckart, including Other People's Houses, a 1953 Goodyear Television Playhouse production about a housekeeper caring for her senile father.

Mosel's most celebrated work, All the Way Home, premiered on November 30, 1960, at the Belasco Theater in New York. A stage adaptation of James Agee's novel A Death in the Family, the play dramatizes the responses of a Tennessee family to the accidental death of the father in the summer of 1915. It earned Mosel the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1961 and received a Tony Award nomination. The play was subsequently produced for television in 1963, 1971, and 1981, and a Danish television version titled I havn, directed by Clara Østø, had appeared as early as 1959. The 1963 film adaptation, directed by Alex Segal and shot in the Knoxville, Tennessee neighborhood where Agee grew up, starred Robert Preston, Jean Simmons, and Pat Hingle.

Beyond the stage and live television, Mosel wrote screenplays for two theatrical films. Dear Heart starred Glenn Ford and Geraldine Page, and Mosel himself appeared in the film in a cameo role as the Man in Lobby. He also adapted Bel Kaufman's novel for the film Up the Down Staircase, which starred Sandy Dennis. For television, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series for his work on The Adams Chronicles, a PBS drama series centered on the lives of presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams and their families.

In 1978, Mosel co-authored Leading Lady: The World and Theater of Katharine Cornell with Gertrude Macy, published by Little, Brown. His earlier collection, Other People's Houses: Six Television Plays, was published by Simon and Schuster in 1956. Many of his television plays are preserved and available for viewing at the Paley Center for Media in New York City and Los Angeles.

Mosel spent the final eighteen years of his life at Havenwood-Heritage Heights, a retirement community in Concord, New Hampshire, where he frequently lectured. He was preceded in death in 1995 by Raymond Tatro, a graphic designer for McCall's magazine and his partner of more than forty years. Mosel died of esophageal cancer. A gift of $100,000 he made to Havenwood-Heritage Heights funded the construction of an auditorium named Tad's Place, dedicated to future speakers at the community.