Helene Hanff - Career

Career

Her career, which saw her move from writing unproduced plays to helping create some of the earliest television dramas to becoming a kind of professional New Yorker, goes far beyond the charm of that one book. She called her 1962 memoir Underfoot in Show Business, and it chronicled the struggle of an ambitious young playwright to make it in the world of New York theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. She worked in publicists' offices and spent summers on the "straw hat" circuit along the East Coast of the United States, writing plays that were admired by some of Broadway's leading producers but which somehow never saw the light of day.

She wrote and edited scripts for a variety of early television dramas produced out of New York, all the while continuing to try to move from being what she called "one of the 999 out of 1,000 who didn't become Moss Hart." Later editions of the book changed this reference to Noël Coward, perhaps supposing modern readers might not be familiar with Moss Hart but when "Underfoot" was originally published, it was only a few years after Hart's memoir "Act One" had been a best seller. When the bulk of television production moved to California, her work slowly dried up, and she turned to writing for magazines and, eventually, to the books that made her reputation.