Joshua Lockwood Logan III was born October 5, 1908 in Texarkana, Texas and attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana before enrolling at Princeton College. As a student, Logan helped form the University Players with Henry Fonda and James Stewart. Before graduating in 1931, he went with a friend to Moscow to study "method acting" with Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Logan's Broadway career was interrupted by military service in the United States Army Air Corps in England during World War II. He married Nedda Harrigan in 1945.
On Broadway, he directed Annie Get Your Gun, John Loves Mary, Mister Roberts, South Pacific and Fanny. He shared the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II for co-writing South Pacific. The show also earned him a Tony Award for Best Director.
Logan's earlier films included Picnic (1955), Bus Stop (1956), Sayonara (1957), and South Pacific (1958). He was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing for Picnic and Sayonara. His later musicals Camelot (1967) and Paint Your Wagon (1969) were less acclaimed. Logan's 1976 autobiography Josh talks frankly about his bipolar disorder. He published Movie Stars, People, and Me in 1978. From 1983-1986, he taught theater at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He died on July 12, 1988 in New York of supranuclear palsy.