Montague Glass

Born in New York City in 1877, Montague Glass built his reputation as a journalist, playwright, and humorist. He is most closely associated with Potash and Perlmutter, a long-running series about two Jewish business partners in the clothing trade, written in a style that echoed the rhythms of immigrant speech and city commerce.

Glass wrote novels, short stories, and plays, and his characters became well known enough to move onto the stage and screen. What made his work last was not just the jokes, but the way he found humanity in arguments, dealmaking, ambition, and everyday misunderstandings.

He died in 1934, but his fiction remains an important example of American popular humor from the early 1900s. Readers still come to him for lively dialogue, quick comic timing, and a vivid picture of New York life in an era of rapid change.