Richard Gehman

Richard Gehman was a prolific American author of three thousand magazine articles (including over four hundred features), five novels, and twelve non-fiction books. Gehman attended McCaskey High School in Lancaster and worked on several daily newspapers in Lancaster before joining the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in World War II, serving for four years as a writer for The Oak Ridge Times in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After the war he moved to New York City and began writing for Esquire, Life, Time, Cosmopolitan, Colliers, Argosy, True, Saga, and Good Housekeeping magazines and was an original Contributing Editor at Playboy before going freelance. Credited with creating the phrase the “Rat Pack,” Gehman was considered a “shadow” member of the group. Among Gehman’s fifteen nonfiction books are: Sardi’s: The Story of a Famous Restaurant (1953), A Murder in Paradise (1954), Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack (1961), The Tall American: The Story of Gary Cooper (1963), That Kid: The Story of Jerry Lewis (1964), Bogart: An Intimate Biography (1965), A Hell of a Life with Harry Richman (1966), The Haphazard Gourmet (1966), How to Write and Sell Magazine Articles (1959), The Best From Cosmopolitan (editor) (1961), Playboy’s Playboy: An Intimate Biography of Hugh Hefner (unpublished). Selected works of fiction: The Slander of Witches (1955), Driven (1960), and The Had (1966). Gehman also wrote the musical play By Hex, which premiered in 1956, and contributed the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust. He appeared as himself in the Jerry Lewis movie The Patsy. Gehman taught writing at: The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, New York University, Columbia University, Indiana University, Pennsylvania State University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College.