Richard Hoffman David Rabe collection

Richard Hoffman, the Brooklyn-based theater collector and bookdealer, built a number of literary collections aroundAmerican playwrights over a period of many years. Hoffman has said that he entered the United States Army in the 1950s as an actor and left as a writer. His military experience led to an assignment to create a television program titled "Your Army in View," which consisted of interviews and live drama. After his discharge from the service in 1955, Hoffman taught in the drama department of The City University of New York. During this period he was awarded a Eugene O'Neill fellowship for playwriting. He also seriously began to collect rare books and first editions of contemporary American dramatists, notably the playwrights Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Neil Simon. Richard Hoffman's interest in collecting first editions led to his career as an antiquarian bookdealer.

The American playwright David Rabe was born March 10, 1940, in Dubuque, Iowa. After graduating from Loras College in Dubuque, he began graduate studies in theater at Villanova University, but he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965. He served until 1967, spending eleven months of this time in Vietnam. Rabe returned to Villanova, studying writing with Raymond Roseliep, Dick Duprey, and George Herman. During this time, he began work on Sticks and Bones, the first play in a loose trilogy dealing with a Vietnam veteran and the war. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Streamers(1976) completed the trilogy.

While working as a feature writer for the New Haven Register in 1969 and 1970, he won an Associated Press Award. Rabe returned to Villanova to teach playwriting and film criticism in the early 1970s. Joseph Papp produced The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in 1972 at the New York Shakespeare Festival and a later Broadway production starred Al Pacino. The play garnered Rabe an Obie Award (Off-Broadway) for distinguished playwriting, the Drama Desk Award, and the Drama Guild Award. The first play from the trilogy, Sticks and Bones, won the Elizabeth Hull-Kate Warriner Award from the Dramatists Guild, a Variety poll award, an Outer Circle Award (1972), and the 1972 Tony Award for best play of the 1971-72 season on Broadway. In the Boom Boom Room (1973), the story of a go-go girl from Manayunk (near Villanova), received a Tony nomination for Best Play. The final part of the Vietnam trilogy, Streamers, received another Tony nomination as well as the 1976 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play. Hurlyburly, about the connected lives of three Hollywood players, premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1984, receiving another "best play" Tony nomination in 1985. The Dog Problem premiered Off-Broadway in 2001.

Rabe has also written two novels, Recital of the Dog (1993) and The Crossing Guard (novelization of the screenplay by Sean Penn, 1995). Rabe has screenwriting credits for I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can (1983), Robert Altman's film version of Streamers (1983), Casualties of War (1989), The Firm (1993), Hurlyburly (1998), and In the Boom Boom Room (in development, 2000).

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRCAdditional information from program notes found in the collection.