Ernest Lehman was an American author, film producer, and screenwriter. He wrote or co-wrote 15 screenplays and was nominated for six Academy Awards, four of them for Best Screenplay. In 2001, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0499626/

Born in Manhattan, Lehman graduated from City College of New York and worked as a freelance fiction writer. His work was published in national magazines, including Collier's, Esquire, and Cosmopolitan.http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/film/holdings/lehman/ His experience as a copywriter for a Broadway press agent gave him the background to write the novella Tell Me About It Tomorrow, about the relationship between a journalist and a press agent.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/movies/06LEHMAN.html Lehman rose to prominence in Hollywood when he adapted the novella into The Sweet Smell of Success starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, though another writer, Clifford Odets, eventually replaced him. Both share credit on the film. Lehman received Academy Award nominations for co-writing Sabrina (1955), writing North by Northwest (1959), and adapting West Side Story (1961) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). As a producer, he also received Best Picture nominations for Virginia Woolf and Hello, Dolly! (1969). The only Oscar he ever received was the lifetime achievement award in 2001.http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0499626/awards

Lehman's most acclaimed work, North by Northwest, is also his only original screenplay.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/movies/06LEHMAN.html Hitchcock suggested a number of ideas, including a chase across Mount Rushmore and a murder at the General Assembly of the United Nations, that Lehman fashioned into the screenplay.http://www.gointothestory.com/2009/05/how-they-write-script-ernest-lehman_26.html The film's crop duster scene was born out of Hitchcock's suggestion that the villains attack the hero with a tornado. Lehman suggested a crop duster instead, which Hitchcock liked. The scene is one of the most famous in film history.http://books.google.com/books?id=NSTf3krVlh4C&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=North+by+Northwest+crop+duster+tornado&source=bl&ots=UJviUOALN6&sig=hrEyYuap-1xpuSgRAfSzNlkPZSE&hl=en&ei=XtC8TPXSGIL68AbC0aX4Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=North%20by%20Northwest%20crop%20duster%20tornado&f=false