ABSTRACT
One of the most influential figures on Broadway from the 1930s through the 1950s, Moss Hart was born in the Bronx on October 24, 1904, to Barnett and Lillian Solomon Hart, Jewish immigrants from London who had come to America around 1895. His father, a cigar maker, lost the source of much of his livelihood when the automatic rolling machine was introduced, and the family, which included a tyrannical grandfather, an eccentric and overly dramatic Aunt Kate, and a younger brother, Bernard, was forced to take in boarders to survive. When money became so tight that it appeared that even Aunt Kate would have to work, she, according to Hart, "blackmailed" her relatives in England to send her a small monthly allowance. Family finances forced Hart to take a job the summer he reached the eighth grade, and he never was to return to public school, a fact that he always resented.
