Robert Kimball

Born in New York City in 1939, Robert Kimball graduated from Yale College in 1961. He was an intern in Representative John V. Lindsay’s office in the summer of 1961. After a year as a Carnegie Teaching Fellow in American History at Yale (1961-62), he accepted Rep. Lindsay’s offer to return to Washington as his legislative assistant; in the summer of 1963, he also became Director of the Republican Legislative Research Association, an organization established by Charles Taft and Alfred Landon to assist Republican Congressmen in the deliberations on civil rights legislation during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. As a principal aide to the House of Representatives Republican leaders, he was one of the four participants who hammered out a bipartisan compromise in October 1963 that helped lead to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. The genesis of his career as a musical theater historian dates back to his undergraduate studies at Yale, where he wrote his senior paper on the American musical in the 1920s. In 1966, during his last year at Yale Law School, he was asked to organize the papers that songwriter Cole Porter had left to Yale, their mutual alma mater. After the heady, historically momentous days he spent in Washington, he did not see a meaningful role for himself in government or politics. And he never practiced law. Instead, his longstanding interest in American musical theater proved stronger than the appeal of the law, and he became a recognized authority on the Great American Songbook and its creators. Immediately after his graduation from Yale Law School in 1967, Mr. Kimball was appointed Curator of Yale University’s Collection of the Literature of the American Musical Theatre. He held that position from 1967 to 1971, and during his tenure began to write extensively about the American musical. Since then, he has served as the longtime artistic adviser to the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts and to the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts. He has been a member of the advisory committee of New York City Center’s Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert series and a consultant on musical theater to the Library of Congress, the Packard Humanities Institute’s musical theater recording project, the estate of Irving Berlin, and the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn. He was a consultant to and participant in the Chicago Humanities Festival for 12 years. From 2008-2011, he was a Tony Awards nominator. He has edited or co-edited six books of lyrics -- by Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, and Johnny Mercer -- for Knopf’s prestigious Complete Lyrics series. He was the editor of two volumes in the Library of America’s American Poets Project: Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics and Ira Gershwin: Selected Lyrics. His other books include Cole (with Brendan Gill), The Gershwins (with Alfred Simon), Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (with William Bolcom), and Reading Lyrics (with Robert Gottlieb). He was the artistic director of six programs on the popular Lyrics and Lyricists series at New York City’s 92nd Street Y: “Serenade in Blue: A Celebration of the Songs of Mack Gordon,” “Johnny Mercer at the Movies,” “Say It with Music: The Songs of Irving Berlin,” “Sunny Side Up: Roaring Through the Twenties with DeSylva, Brown & Henderson,” “Makin’ Whoopee: Walter Donaldson, Gus Kahn and the Jazz Age,” and “Sweepin’ the Clouds Away: Boom, Bust and High Spirits.” He has lectured on the history of American musical theater at Yale, New York University, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and the Manhattan School of Music. He was a music and dance reviewer for the New York Post from 1973 to 1986, and the newspaper’s chief classical music critic from 1986 to 1988. In 1987, he received a Drama Desk Award for his rediscovery of lost musical-theater manuscripts at the Warner Bros. Secaucus, New Jersey warehouse, including more than 200 manuscripts of Jerome Kern, among them songs from Show Boat. In 1992 he was nominated for two Grammy Awards for his work on the Indiana Historical Society’s comprehensive reissue project of Cole Porter recordings. He appeared as a commentator on the 2004 PBS series Broadway: The American Musical. He has lectured on the Gershwins, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin aboard Cunard, Holland America and Crystal Cruises ships. With time on his hands during the Covid pandemic, he decided to revisit the memoir he had started decades earlier about his experience working on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which River Grove Books is publishing in September 2021. He and his wife, Abigail, are longtime residents of New York City’s midtown Manhattan, where they raised their son and daughter and continue to enjoy the city’s abundant cultural offerings.