Humphrey Bogart of the play, "a peach ... a roaring Western melodrama ... Humphrey Bogart does the best work of his career as an actor." Bogart said that the play "marked my deliverance from the ranks of the sleek, sybaritic, stiff-shirted, swallow-tailed 'smoothies' to which I seemed condemned to life." This, however, did not yet mean felt secure. Warner Bros. bought the screen rights to "The Petrified Forest". The play seemed perfect for the studio, which was famous for its socially realistic, urban, low-budget action pictures, especially for a public entranced by real-life criminals like John Dillinger (whom Bogart resembled) and Dutch
Elizabeth Bogart Bogart was born in New York City in 1795. Her father, Reverend David Schuyler Bogart, was a Columbia College graduate and Presbyterian minister with Huguenot heritage whose family had been in New York for generations. Bogart grew up in and received her education in Southampton, which at that time was an isolated town on the eastern part of Long Island. In 1813 the family moved to Hempstead Harbor, eighty miles west. It was there she began writing and later submitting her writing to publications. In 1825, her poem "Stanzas" was published in the "Long Island Star" under the pen name