Samson Raphaelson - Other Writing and Activities

Other Writing and Activities

In 1948, Raphaelson taught a master class in “creative writing with an emphasis on the drama” at the University of Illinois. He recorded the experience in a book, The Human Nature of Playwriting. The introduction expresses Raphaelson’s deep regard for language so visible in his writing:

This course does not aim directly to teach writing. Whether you write or not after you finish school means nothing to me as a teacher. In fact, I don’t think it is important from any viewpoint. But whether you live or not is important; and how you live. You may become businessmen or women, office workers, farmers, or wives, and as such you will be, whether you know it or not, deeply related to the culture of your age. That culture is largely expressed by creative writers through the written word. And if from this course you get a notion of how that written word comes into being, of the connection between a writer and his own life and between his life and all lives, then this course will be successful indeed.

In the 1940s many Raphaelson short stories appeared in Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and The Saturday Evening Post, in that period the nation’s highest-paying publishers of short fiction.

In later years, as a result of Raphaelson’s newly found passion for photography, he wrote a variety of articles for the leading photographic magazines. Some of his thousands of photos ran in the magazines, both as accompaniments to his articles and independent of them.

In 1983 the University of Wisconsin Press published Three Screen Comedies by Samson Raphaelson with an introduction by Pauline Kael. All directed by Lubitsch, the three were Trouble in Paradise, Heaven Can Wait, and Raphaelson’s favorite, The Shop Around the Corner, which had starred James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan and which Kael wrote was “as close to perfection as a movie made by mortals is ever likely to be; it couldn’t be the airy wonder it was without the structure Raphaelson built into it.” (The story was remade in 1998 as You've Got Mail, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.)

Three Screen Comedies also included a reprint of Freundschaft, Raphaelson’s wry and affectionate reflection on his working relationship with Lubitsch that had originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1982.

In his series of television documentaries on creativy Bill Moyers devoted a full half-hour program to an extended interview with Raphaelson.

In his seventies and early eighties Raphaelson became an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York, where he taught a graduate course in screenwriting. In 1976 Columbia awarded him an honorary degree.

Raphaelson died in July 1983.