Tad Mosel, a leading writer of live television dramas in the 1950s who won a Pulitzer Prize for "All the Way Home," his 1960 Broadway dramatization of James Agee's novel "A Death in the Family," has died. He was 86.
Mosel, who had cancer and lived in an assisted-living home in Concord, N.H., died Aug. 24, said director Arthur Penn, a longtime friend.
During the golden age of live television, Mosel was a major contributor of original scripts for dramatic anthology series such as "Goodyear Television Playhouse," "Studio One" and "Playhouse 90."
"I thought he was in the first echelon" of writers, Penn, who directed several of Mosel's teleplays in the '50s, told The Times last week. "He was a very modest, shy, gay man; and he wrote with enormous sensitivity."
Mosel was, as former Times TV critic Cecil Smith wrote in 1962, "one of the brilliant stable of playwrights developed by producer Fred Coe -- one that included Paddy Chayefsky, Bob Aurthur, Horton Foote and J.P. Miller."
Coe had been fascinated by "A Death in the Family" -- Agee's 1957 autobiographical novel about the effects of a father's death in a car accident on his Tennessee family in 1915 that earned him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1958 -- and commissioned Mosel to adapt it for "Playhouse 90."
But, as The Times' reported in 1961, "Playhouse 90" was foundering, so Coe asked CBS to release it to him for the stage.
With Penn as director, "All the Way Home" opened on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre in November 1960, with a cast that included Colleen Dewhurst, Aline MacMahon, Arthur Hill and Lillian Gish.
But the play almost closed soon after its debut.
Although most of the critics praised "All the Way Home," Coe recalled in a 1961 interview with The Times, the Thursday opening night box office -- $340 -- was so disappointing that a closing notice was put up for the following Monday.
But on Sunday, Ed Sullivan praised the play on his national TV variety show, and on Monday the closing notices were taken down.
It would run for 333 performances, closing in September 1961.
"All the Way Home," which was nominated for a Tony Award for best play, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1961.
"Winning the Pulitzer Prize can paralyze a writer," Mosel told The Times in 1962. "The only answer is to make believe you never heard of it and plunge back into your work."
