Edgar Yipsel Harburg was born in on New York City's depressed East Side, into an extremely poor family. His deprived upbringing moulded "Yip" into a staunch supporter of left-wing causes, for which he was to be blacklisted by Hollywood in the late s.
Harburg odd-jobbed to pay for his schooling at Townsend Harris High, where he co-edited a literary column in the school paper with fellow pupil Ira Gershwin, who was to become his friend for life.
Together, they went on to study at the College of the City of New York where they contributed verse to the publication New York World. In , Harburg graduated with a BSc.
The Lyricist
For three years, Harburg knocked about Montevideo, in South America, before returning to New York to set up the Consolidated Electrical Appliance Co. This failed with the crash of , and in desperation he turned to writing verse and articles. As luck would have it, composer and head of music at Paramount, Jay Gorney, liked his verse, supplying Yip simultaneously with a musical partner and a movie contract. They wrote six songs for the Broadway revue Earl Carroll's Sketchbook (), which ran successfully for a year-and-a-half.
E.Y. "Yip" Harburg
Edgar Yipsel “Yip” Harburg was an American lyricist, librettist, and social justice poet. He was born Isidore Hochberg on April 8, on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Harburg’s parents were Russian immigrants who only spoke Yiddish, and his family lived in poverty. In high school, Harburg met and became friends with Ira Gershwin, who would become one of the foremost American lyricists, and the two remained friends for life. Harburg attended and graduated from the City College of New York.
After college, Harburg became a meat packer and wrote poetry for local newspapers before becoming the owner of an electrical appliance company, which went bankrupt in the great stock market crash of Since Harburg was unable to find work, Gershwin suggested that he begin to write lyrics. Harburg began to write lyrics for successful Broadway revues and his career in putting his imprint on American musical standards began. Harburg wrote the lyrics to the Depression-era anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
Harburg went to Hollywood where he collaborated on several musical films, but his most prominent mark in history was serving as the lyricist and a screenwriter
Harburg, E. Y.
Popular song lyricist E.Y. "Yip" Harburg (–) was quoted as saying by Clyde Haberman of the New York Times that "songs are the pulse of a nation's heart, a fever chart of its health."
Harburg wrote the words to at least two familiar songs that reflected and embodied aspects of the American national outlook: "Over the Rainbow," from the musical film The Wizard of Oz, was a timeless expression of yearning, while "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" was a hard-luck story of the Great Depression that shaped so many American lives.
There was much more to Harburg than just those two songs, however. During the era of classic Broadway song, Harburg was a frequent collaborator with the top tunesmiths in the business, Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen above all. Harburg wrote lyrics for musicals whose stories he had developed from scratch, including several, such as Finian's Rainbow, that reflected his progressive political convictions. Harburg wrote romantic songs, comic songs, and serious songs in proportions roughly equivalent to those found in the productions of other songwriters. What defined his work above all was a sensitivity to the craft of the lyricist,
Yip Harburg - Biography
Edgar Yipsel Harburg (April 8, – March 5, ), known as E.Y. Harburg or Yip Harburg, was an American popular song lyricist who worked with many well-known composers. He wrote the lyrics to the standards, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", "April in Paris", and "It's Only a Paper Moon", as well as all of the songs in The Wizard of Oz, including "Over the Rainbow".
Life and career
Harburg, the youngest of four surviving children (out of ten), was born Isidore Hochberg on the Lower East Side of New York City on April 8, His parents, Lewis Hochberg and Mary Ricing, were faithful, Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. Harburg's nickname "Yipsel" (often shortened to "Yip") came about as "Yipsel" is how people pronounced "YPSL" -- the acronym for the Young People's Socialist League of which he was a member. Some have incorrectly believed that "Yipsel" is a Yiddish word meaning "squirrel."
Later, he adopted the name Edgar Harburg. He was best known as Edgar "Yip" Harburg. He attended Townsend Harris High School, where he and Ira Gershwin, who met over a shared fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan, worked on the school paper and
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