The Lawrence and Lee collection includes a broad sample of the material that this important team created for radio, television, and the stage. Included in the collection are complete holdings for The Railroad hour, Favorite story, and Young love, as well as representative holdings for Request performance, Hallmark playhouse, A Date with Judy, and numerous other programs. Holdings from their later activities include tapes of interviews with and lectures by one or both men, as well as private recordings that document the development of scripts and stories for Auntie Mame, Shangri-La, and The Gang's all here.
All programs that Lawrence and Lee wrote or produced for the Armed Forces Radio Service have been cataloged separately as part of The Armed Forces Radio Service collection of broadcast recordings. Cross references for these have been included in the Lawrence and Lee finding aid, but for complete information about AFRS recordings donate by Lawrence and Lee, see the AFRS finding aid in *L(Special) 88-31. Some of the AFRS programs that Lawrence and Lee worked on were: Command performance, Mail call, Yarns for Yanks, and Words with music. Programs by Lawrence and Lee which were produced independently, and for which the archives has major holdings, have also been cataloged separately. These programs are: Request performance, Favorite story, and The Railroad hour.
Acquisition: Lawrence, Jerome and Lee, Robert E. Gift 799 sound recordings
Biographical/historical: Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee were a creative team who wrote, adapted, and produced scripts for radio broadcasts, television programs, and musical theatre productions from the 1940's into the 1970's. Lawrence and Lee began their collaboration with the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS), which they helped to create in 1942. While with the AFRS, they wrote a wide variety of programs that were broadcast to troops overseas - comedy programs, dramatic programs, and informational programs - including such titles as Command performance, Yarns for Yanks, and Mail call.
After the war, Lawrence and Lee continued their collaboration, working in commercial radio and producing such programs as The Railroad hour, Request performance,Favorite story, and Young love. At the same time, they began to write musicals and television scripts, such as the television adaptaion of James Hilton's Lost horizon, which was aired under the title Shangri-La, and the musical production of Auntie Mame. Overall, Lawrence and Lee produced many major works for radio, television and stage.
Both Lawrence and Lee were active in later years as teachers and lecturers, giving talks to a wide range of academic and industry groups around the country and world.
