Joseph Stein

From wikipedia: Joseph Stein (30 May 1912 - 24 October 2010) was an American Jewish playwright. A chance encounter with Zero Mostel led him to start writing for radio personalities, including Henry Morgan, Hildegarde, Tallulah Bankhead, Phil Silvers, and Jackie Gleason. He later started working in television for Sid Caesar when he joined the writing team of Your Show of Shows, which included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon. Stein made his Broadway debut contributing sketches written with William Glickman to the 1948 revue Lend an Ear. His first book musical came about when Richard Kollmar, husband of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, asked him to write a musical about Pennsylvania that would promote the state as Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! had done for its namesake. Stein and Glickman were drawn to the Amish community of Lancaster County. They purchased a 50-cent tourist book filled with Pennsylvania Dutch slang and returned to New York to write Plain and Fancy, which opened on Broadway on 27 January 1955 and ran for 461 performances. It was an "old-fashioned, low-pressure alternative set among the Pennsylvania Dutch. It was pleasant and certainly suitable for the family trade." His greatest success was the book for the 1964 musical play Fiddler on the Roof, for which he later wrote the film screenplay.