Mary Coyle Chase was born in Denver, Colorado (1907-1981), which is likely the model for the “western town” where Harvey takes place. When she was a little girl, her Irish uncles would amuse Mary with stories from Celtic mythology of pookas and banshees. She attended the University of Denver, and at age 17, was hired as a newspaper reporter, first for the Rocky Mountain News, and then as a freelance correspondent for United Press and International News Service.

Mary covered everything from three-alarm fires to society events. Her outrageous pranks, quick wit, and active imagination were well known. Mary married fellow reporter, Robert Lamont Chase, in 1928. She worked at the newspaper until one of her telephone pranks to an editor working to meet a deadline got her fired. She was briefly re-hired, but quit to pursue her writing and raise her three sons.

Mary began writing fiction, beginning with short stories and children’s books, but her greatest success came with the play, Harvey, which took two years to write. She meticulously constructed a miniature stage on the dining room table in her house in Denver so that she could imagine the characters’ movements. The play underwent at least fifty rewrites, some of them quite significant. Originally, when it was titled The Pooka, Harvey was a six-foot-tall parakeet. In a later version, The White Rabbit, Harvey was identified as audiences know him today, but the lead was a woman.

The Broadway production opened November 1, 1944 and ran for almost five years. It was directed by Antoinette Perry, the namesake of the Tony Awards. Former Vaudeville star Frank Faynote played the role of Elwood P. Dowd. Jimmy Stewart was one of his replacements later in the Broadway run and he played the role again in the 1950 movie.

When the play opened in New York, Mary and her husband were so low on funds they had to borrow $300 from a Denver bank in order to attend. "Money has never been anything you made," Chase once said. "It has merely been something you owed."

After Harvey’s success on Broadway, earning her a Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1945, Mary continued to write plays (15 total), but only with marginal success. She was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 1985 and the original manuscript for Harvey is at the University of Denver in Special Collections and Archives. Her biography, “Pulling Harvey Out of Her Hat: The Amazing Story of Mary Coyle Chase”, by Mimi Pockross, was published in 2020.