In 1924, Metropolitan Opera board chairman Otto Kahn proposed that the yet-to-be-written Great American Opera might well be a “jazz opera.” Eleven years later, George Gershwin's engagement with Kahn's idea came to fruition in Porgy and Bess (1935), set to a libretto by DuBose Heyward, based on Heyward's novella Porgy (1925) and his play of the same name staged in 1927. Several months before Porgy was published, Gershwin had already decided that a work of Kahn's description would have to be written for a black cast. Gershwin and Heyward, two white men, revealed through their collaboration not an exploitative impulse but an understanding that the wellsprings of an American operatic art might lie as much with the performers as with the creators.