Anderson, Maxwell

Anderson, Maxwell (1888–1959), born in Pennsylvania, was reared in North Dakota, from whose state university he graduated in 1911. He received his M.A. from Stanford (1914), taught school in California and North Dakota, and entered a career of journalism, which brought him to New York and continued until 1924. His first play was White Desert (1923), a tragedy of repressed lives in North Dakota, and his second, written with Laurence Stallings, was the immensely successful war play, What Price Glory? (1924). With Stallings he also wrote First Flight (1925), about an episode in the youth of Andrew Jackson, and The Buccaneer (1925), about the pirate Sir Henry Morgan. These were collected in Three American Plays (1926). Anderson published his only book of poems as You Who Have Dreams (1925). Outside Looking In (1925) was a dramatization of Jim Tully's Beggars of Life, and Saturday's Children (1927) a comedy of modern marital relations. His next play, written with Harold Hickerson, was Gods of the Lightning (1928), dealing with the Sacco‐Vanzetti case, and he turned to blank‐verse drama with Elizabeth the Queen (1930), concerned with Elizabeth's love for the Earl of Essex. Night Over Taos (1932), also in verse, dramatizes the end of the feudal era in New Mexico in 1847. Both Your Houses (1933, Pulitzer Prize) is a prose satire of political corruption in Congress. With Mary of Scotland (1933), the author returned to verse and to English and Scottish history, but Valley Forge (1934) has a distinctly American theme, as do many of his later plays, which include Winterset (1935), a verse tragedy suggested by the Sacco‐Vanzetti case; The Wingless Victory (1936), an adaptation of the Medea theme, set in Salem in 1800; The Masque of Kings (1936), a verse play concerning the Mayerling affair; High Tor (1937), a satirical fantasy on the encroachments of industrialism on personal liberty; The Star Wagon (1937), a prose fantasy about an inventor who controls time; and Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), a musical comedy (with music by Kurt Weill) satirizing the New Deal through a story of Stuyvesant's New Netherland. Later verse plays include Key Largo (1939), about an idealistic American in the Spanish Loyalist army; Journey to Jerusalem (1940), about the young Jesus; and The Eve of St. Mark (1942), about an American farm boy killed in World War II. Two other plays concerned with this war are Candle in the Wind (1941) and Storm Operation (1944), the latter about U.S. soldiers in North Africa. After a lesser play, Truckline Café (1946), he wrote three historical dramas: Joan of Lorraine (1947), interpreting Joan of Arc as a mystic through a drama about the production of a play concerning different conceptions of her; Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), about Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII; and Barefoot in Athens (1951), about Socrates. Lost in the Stars (1948) was a dramatization of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country for a musical production, and The Bad Seed (1955) was a dramatization of the last novel by William March, concerning an evil child. Eleven Verse Plays (1940) collects some of his dramas. His radio plays include The Feast of Ortolans (1938), set in France in 1789. Essays are printed in The Essence of Tragedy (1938) and Off Broadway (1940).