Frank Loesser seemed to compress multiple professional lives into one, establishing himself as a Broadway figure through Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, turning out roughly six wartime numbers that included "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," and supplying lyrics for assorted 1940s Hollywood pictures. Born in New York City in 1910 into a musical household, he rejected structured instruction and instead taught himself at the keyboard. Uninterested in pursuing entertainment as a vocation, he left college early and held an assortment of positions—office boy, reporter, inspector, advertising salesman, and occasional vaudevillian. Once he sold a single number to another performer, he secured employment writing lyrics on Tin Pan Alley, where his first work appeared in 1931. Although Fats Waller cut one of his early-thirties pieces, "I Wish I Were Twins," Loesser still struggled and supplemented his earnings by performing nightly on 52nd Street.
In 1936 he headed west, convinced Hollywood offered greater financial reward. A contract with Universal ended within a year, yet he quickly scored with "The Moon of Manakoora," performed by Dorothy Lamour in the 1937 release The Hurricane. Additional modest screen successes arrived through the late thirties and early forties—"I Fall in Love with You Every Day," "The Boys in the Back Room," "Kiss the Boys Goodbye"—each created with different musical partners.
True widespread recognition arrived in 1942, shortly after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. Building a lyric around a remark he had overheard and adding a handful of melodic notes to support its phrasing, Loesser produced "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." Issued that same year, the song moved several million copies, counting sheet-music sales, throughout the war period; Kay Kyser and the Merry Macs each supplied hit recordings. Loesser subsequently enlisted and kept writing service-themed material such as "First Class Mary Brown," "The WAC Hymn," "What Do You Do in the Infantry?" and "Salute to the Army Air Force."
Following World War II he remained active in Hollywood, where he received an Academy Award in 1949 for "Baby It's Cold Outside" from Neptune's Daughter, yet he also revisited Broadway. There he supplied the score for 1948's Where's Charley?, a preparatory step toward his major triumph, 1950's Guys and Dolls. That production accumulated more than 1,200 performances, saw repeated revivals both on and off-Broadway, and reached the screen in 1955 with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando. The Most Happy Fella arrived in 1956; it marked the first occasion Loesser wrote both book and music. The show enjoyed moderate success, as did 1960's Greenwillow. His next major achievement came in 1961, when How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying secured the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and the Drama Critics Circle Award for best musical. Although his final stage effort, Pleasures and Palaces, proved unsuccessful, the 1967 screen adaptation of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying largely overshadowed that outcome. Frank Loesser succumbed to cancer in 1969.
