Nash published two books on philosophy, The Athenian Spirit and The Wounds of Sparta. Nash wrote his first play, Parting at Imsdorf, in 1940, which won the Maxwell AndersonVerse Drama Award. He next penned the Shakespearian-themed comedy The Second Best Bed, produced on Broadway in 1946. The highly acclaimed drama led to him writing more shows, including The Young and Fair, See the Jaguar, and The Rainmaker. The Rainmaker, a full-length play, had originally been a Philco Television Playhouse one-act 1953 television production. It was translated to over 40 languages and made into a 1956 Hollywood film starring Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn, and a 1982 full-length TV production. The play was made into a Broadway musical, 110 in the Shade. Here Come the Brides was a Screen Gems television series developed by Nash; Nash wrote the series pilot of the same name. IMDB https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0621783/ In the 1950s, Nash moved from New York to Hollywood to write the screenplay for The Rainmaker. However, it was the 1972 Broadway failure of Echoes and the novelization of a screenplay that led Nash to transition from writing screenplays to writing novels. After working on Echoes, he developed a screenplay entitled Macho which he could not sell. In overcoming this, Nash noted: Nash's novel Cry Macho was published in June 1975 by Delacorte Press. Over the decades, there have been two aborted efforts to produce a movie of Cry Macho - a feature starring Roy Scheider began initial production in Mexico in 1991, while Arnold Schwarzenegger originally planned to return to acting in 2011, after his time as Governor of California, with a film of Cry Macho that was eventually cancelled. After selling Cry Macho, Nash began to write what he called "real novels" and discover that writing a novel was more flexible than writing a play and received much less criticism than writing a play. Nash wrote a number of screenplays, novels and more plays, including the screenplays for the 1947 Ann Sheridan film noir vehicle, Nora Prentiss, The Sainted Sisters, Dear Wife, Mara Maru, Helen of Troy, Porgy and Bess and Between the Darkness and the Dawn. Other Broadway shows include Girls of Summer, Handful of Fire, Wildcat, 110 in the Shade, The Happy Time, and Saravà. Nash's novels include East Wind, Rain, Radiance, The Last Magic, and an unpublished novel, The Wildwood. Under the pseudonym of John Roc, he wrote a play, Fire!, and a novel, Winter Blood.
Personal life
In 1935, Nash married Helena Taylor, with whom he had one son, Christopher. They divorced in 1954. Nash was married to Janice Rule in 1956, but they divorced later that same year. Later that year, he married Katherine Copeland, aka Katherine Kaplan, with whom he had two daughters, Jennifer and Amanda.
