Anderson, [James] Maxwell (1888–1959), playwright. Born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, and educated at the University of North Dakota and at Stanford, he became a playwright only after careers as a schoolteacher and a journalist. His first produced play,
The White Desert (1923), a study of the tragic consequences of marital jealousy, was a failure, but success followed when he collaborated with Laurence Stallings on the war drama
What Price Glory? (1924). After several other less satisfactory collaborations with Stallings, he again found acclaim with his picture of white‐collar married life,
Saturday's Children (1927). Anderson's first attempt to dramatize the Sacco‐Vanzetti case,
Gods of the Lightning (1928), written with Harold Hickerson, won little attention; but later in the same season his examination of a mercurial, unstable flapper,
Gypsy (1929), won some high praise. He turned to blank‐verse drama for his recounting of the Elizabeth‐Essex story,
Elizabeth the Queen (1930), and its success prompted him to write many of his subsequent dramas in similar blank verse, making him the only major 20th‐century American playwright to do so. His subsequent highly lauded plays include
Night Over Taos (1932), about the Spanish resistance to American advances in early 19th‐century New Mexico; the political satire
Both Your Houses (1933);
Mary of Scotland (1933), centering on Mary Stuart;
Valley Forge (1934), dealing with Washington's struggles in the Revolutionary War;
Winterset (1935), another play based on Sacco and Vanzetti and the first work to win the
New York Drama Critics Circle Award;
Wingless Victory (1936), a story of a doomed interracial marriage; and the fantasy
High Tor (1937). His 1937 verse play about the Mayerling incident,
The Masque of Kings, failed, but was followed by
The Star Wagon (1937), a fantasy about a couple who return to their youth to reconsider their lives. More verse plays followed:
Key Largo (1939), dealing with the Spanish Civil War;
Journey to Jerusalem (1940), a story of the young Jesus; and
Candle in the Wind (1941), an antiwar play.
The Eve of St. Mark (1942) depicted a family farm during the war,
Storm Operation (1944) centered on the North African campaign, and
Truckline Cafe (1946) told of an ex‐soldier's search for his unfaithful, shamed wife.
Joan of Lorraine (1946) succeeded largely on the appeal of Ingrid
Bergman in the title role. He used historical personages Anne Boleyn in
Anne of the Thousand Days (1948) and Socrates in
Barefoot in Athens (1951), and adapted William March's novel about a vicious child,
The Bad Seed (1954). Anderson also wrote the book and lyrics for two Kurt
Weill musicals:
Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), which included “September Song,” and
Lost in the Stars (1949). His frustration with producers led him to cofound the
Playwrights' Company in 1938, and he often railed against the drama critics, once calling them “a sort of Jukes family of journalism” and adding, “It is an insult to our theatre that there should be so many incompetents and irresponsibles among them.” John Mason
Brown recalled him as “a great, shy bear of a man, rich in humility and conscience, haunted by a high vision of tragedy, a better dramatist than poet, needing actors to lift his verse into poetry but bravely trying to bring back the music of language to a tone‐deaf stage.” Biography:
The Life of Maxwell Anderson, Alfred S. Shivers, 1983.
