Ketti Frings
Ketti Frings was an American playwright and screenwriter, known for her significant contributions to theater and literature. Born Katherine Hartley Frings in Columbus, Ohio, she pursued her education at Principia College before leaving to work as a copywriter during the Great Depression. Her career included various roles in advertising and writing, including ghostwriting and scriptwriting, before she gained recognition in the theater world. Frings achieved notable success with her 1957 play, "Look Homeward, Angel," an adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's novel, which earned her a Pulitzer Prize in Drama and cemented her status as a prominent playwright.
In addition to her acclaimed plays, she adapted several films for the stage and continued to write screenplays throughout her career, including works for television. Frings's other notable projects include the stage adaptation of "Judgment at Nuremberg" and her television script for "Look Homeward, Angel." She also published short stories and articles in various periodicals. Ketti Frings passed away in 1981, leaving behind a legacy of influential dramatic works.
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Subject Terms
Ketti Frings
Writer
- Born: 1915
- Birthplace: Columbus, Ohio
- Died: February 11, 1981
- Place of death: Los Angeles, California
Biography
Playwright and screenwriter Katherine Hartley Frings, who throughout her life went by her nickname, Ketti, was born in Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of Guy Herbert and Pauline Sparks Hartley. Ketti’s father was a salesman. Having completed secondary school, she entered Principia College in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1933. The Great Depression was raging at that time, so eventually she left college and became a copywriter in the advertising department of Bamberger’s department store in Newark, New Jersey.
In 1938, she married a literary agent, Kurt Frings. Subsequently, she held various jobs with advertising agencies in Manhattan and also served as a ghostwriter, scriptwriter, and columnist for a number of projects, gaining valuable writing experience in the process. In 1950, at age thirty-five, she became a feature writer for United Press International. By this time, she had already published two novels, neither of which was resoundingly successful. She had also written Mr. Sycamore, which was produced in 1942 and thirty-two years later appeared as a screenplay.
By this time, Frings had gained considerable celebrity, largely through the highly successful production of her three-act drama, Look Homeward, Angel (pr. 1957), based on Thomas Wolfe’s novel that Scribner’s published in 1929. This play, the year after it came to Broadway, brought Frings both a Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In the same year, Frings was also named Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and received the Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioana Award.
Look Homeward, Angel marked a turning point in Frings’s career as a dramatist. Before writing it and seeing it produced, she had written several screenplays, the most artistically successful of which were her scripts for Foxfire (1955) and The Shrike (1955) as well as her 1952 adaptation of William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba (pr., pb. 1950). Following the success of Look Homeward, Angel, Frings wrote the stage version of Judgment at Nuremberg, based on the Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann film. This play opened on Broadway in 1970.
Fifteen years after its Broadway premiere, Frings provided the script for a television version of Look Homeward, Angel. This version was aired by the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1972 to a largely favorable critical reception. Frings continued to write quite prolifically until her death in 1981, publishing a number of her short stories and articles in such periodicals as Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Collier’s, and Good Housekeeping.