If Eugene O’Neill represents the tragic mask of American drama, then George S. Kaufman can easily lay claim to its smiling counterpart. No other comic dramatist in America has enjoyed more popular success and perennial influence or been more fortunate in his choice of collaborators, who included George and Ira Gershwin, Moss Hart, Irving Berlin, and the Marx Brothers. Here, in the most comprehensive collection of his plays ever assembled, are nine classics: his uproarious “backstage” play  The Royal Family  (1927, written with Edna Ferber); the Marx Brothers–inspired mayhem of  Animal Crackers  (1928, with Morrie Ryskind), in a version discovered in Groucho Marx’s papers and published here for the first time;  June Moon  (1929, with Ring Lardner), a hilarious look at a young composer trying to make it big on Tin Pan Alley;  Once in a Lifetime  (1930, with Moss Hart), one of the first and best satires of Hollywood; Pulitzer Prize winners  Of Thee I Sing (1931, with Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin) and  You Can’t Take It with You  (1936, with Moss Hart);  Dinner at Eight (1932, with Edna Ferber), a tart ensemble piece that mixes comedy and melodrama;  Stage Door  (1936, with Edna Ferber), his much-loved story about young actresses trying to make it big in New York City; and  The Man Who Came to Dinner  (1939, with Moss Hart), an unforgettable burlesque of America’s cult of celebrity. Bursting with vernacular wit, farcical ingenuity, and theatrical panache, these plays have remained beloved favorites and exuberant reminders of Broadway in its glory days. LIBRARY OF AMERICA  is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. “The best anthology of American plays that anyone’s put out in years.” —  Boston Phoenix George Simon Kaufman  (1889–1961) was an award-winning playwright, theatre director and producer, humorist, and drama critic.  Laurence Maslon , editor, is an associate arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a former associate artistic director at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. He was senior consultant and co-writer for two episodes of the six-part PBS series  Broadway: The American Musical , as well as coauthoring, with Michael Kantor, the companion volume for the documentary. Like many uncommonly funny people, George S. Kaufman could be difficult, headstrong, irascible, arrogant and overbearing, yet he was the ultimate team player. If Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, Kaufman was the Great Collaborator. Over a show-business career that spanned more than four decades, he teamed up with various gifted writers to produce hugely popular Broadway plays and musicals, many of which were turned into hugely popular Hollywood movies -- "Of Thee I Sing," "Dinner at Eight," "Stage Door," "You Can't Take It With You," "The Man Who Came to Dinner" -- and he directed many of them as well, which is to say that he presided over collaborative undertakings involving scores, even hundreds, of people. When word arrived that Kaufman was to be honored with his own volume in the Library of America, I was delighted. As an adolescent in the 1950s and a young man in the 1960s, I was a passionate Kaufmanite. My worn copy of the Modern Library's Six Plays by Kaufman & Hart was my bedside companion and my vade mecum, accompanying me from one place to another, providing endless laughter and delight. Precisely when and why I stopped reading Kaufman's plays I cannot say, but they remained fixed in memory among the great pleasures of youth. Of the six plays in that volume, plays upon which Kaufman collaborated with Moss Hart, only three make it into the Library of America collection: "Once in a Lifetime," "You Can't Take It With You" and "The Man Who Came to Dinner." The ones missing are "Merrily We Roll Along," "The American Way" and "George Washington Slept Here." Instead we are given three plays that Kaufman wrote with Edna Ferber ("The Royal Family," "Dinner at Eight" and "Stage Door"), two he wrote with Morrie Ryskind ("Animal Crackers" and "Of Thee I Sing"), and one he wrote with Ring Lardner ("June Moon"). This doubtless is more representative of Kaufman's busy and varied career, but it has an unfortunate and presumably unintended side effect: It leaves no doubt that when Kaufman wasn't collaborating with Hart, the quality of his work went way, way down. With the exception of "Of Thee I Sing," the plays Kaufman wrote with Ferber, Ryskind and Lardner -- plays produced over nine years, beginning with "The Royal Family" in December 1927 -- are period pieces now, and even "Of Thee I Sing" barely m