Continuing in our self-appointed role as the punctuation periodical of record, the editorial collective at t&p is chuffed to offer to (both) our loyal readers this inspiring tale of how the modest semicolon acted as a career-catalyst — transcribed from one of the Bonus Features included with Criterion’s DVD edition of Heaven Can Wait (the 1943 version directed by Ernst Lubitsch of course). Screenwriter Samson Raphaelson is speaking:

One day I read a story about a writer, and boy, I didn’t know this: they made a lot of money! This guy stood on the stairs of his Long Island estate, and his wife, a former actress, and greyhound dogs: that was for me.

[…] I rented a typewriter, something happened, and I knew I could do it, I put it on the dining room table, and I bought white paper, and I put it in, and I started to think of something. I didn’t plan it out, but as I started to think, the first paragraph presented so damn many problems that I worked over it for maybe two or three days.

Because I had a guy, and he had some thoughts, and also he was going to be in Peking, although he started off in New York, and I made the discovery in those three days that I could do that in the middle of a sentence. You see: “semicolon, two weeks later in Peking he not only was sorry he’d said that, but he wept in his bedroom, that dark, cold hotel on a side street, middleclass…” Gee! What a jump I could do on paper!