Maxwell Anderson

Maxwell Anderson 1888-1959, American dramatist, b. Atlantic, Pa., grad. Univ. of North Dakota, 1911. His plays, many of which are written in verse, usually concern social and moral problems. Anderson was a journalist until the successful production in 1924 of What Price Glory?, a war drama written with Laurence Stallings. Winterset (1935), based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, is probably Anderson's most successful verse tragedy. He wrote many historical dramas including Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Mary of Scotland (1933), Valley Forge (1934), Joan of Lorraine (1947), Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), and Barefoot in Athens (1951). Among his other plays are Both Your Houses (1933), High Tor (1937), The Star Wagon (1937), Key Largo (1939), and The Eve of St. Mark (1942). He also wrote the librettos for Kurt Weill's Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) and Lost in the Stars (1940). A collection of his poetry, Notes on a Dream, was published in 1972.

His eldest son, Quentin Anderson, 1914-2003, b. Minnewauken, N.Dak., was a literary critic, cultural historian, and Columbia Univ. professor (1939-81). Educated at Columbia (B.A., 1937; Ph. D., 1953) and Harvard (M.A., 1945), he was an expert on 19th-century American literature and wrote such books as The American Henry James (1957), The Imperial Self (1971), and Making Americans (1992).

Bibliography: See biography by A. S. Shivers (1982); bibliography by M. Cox (1958, repr. 1974).

Anderson, (James) Maxwell (1888–1959), major and prolific American dramatist who wrote many of his plays in blank verse. His What Price Glory? (1924), written in collaboration, was a great popular hit, portraying realistically and sympathetically the American soldier in action during the First World War. Another outstanding popular success was Saturday's Children (1927), about the marriage problems of a young couple. A realistic play of modern city life, Gypsy (1929), preceded a series of idealistically conceived historical and pseudo-historical plays. The best of these were Elizabeth the Queen (1930), the first of his blank-verse plays, Night over Taos (1932), Mary of Scotland (1933), Valley Forge (1934), and The Wingless Victory (1936; London, 1943), about a mixed marriage. But Anderson was never content to follow any one dramatic or artistic formula. His realistic satires on political subjects are among his most effective works, among them Both Your Houses (1933), a savage attack on political corruption which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In the fantasy High Tor (1937) he combined poetic drama with formal verse, philosophy, and political commentary; and in Winterset (1935), based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and Key Largo (1939), whose action begins in the Spanish Civil War, he sought to make tragic poetry out of the stuff of his own times. Among his later plays were another wartime play, The Eve of St Mark (1942; London, 1943), Joan of Lorraine (1946), on Joan of Arc, Anne of the Thousand Days (1948), on Anne Boleyn, and The Bad Seed (1954; London, 1955), a study of inherited homicidal tendencies, based on a novel. He also wrote the book and lyrics for the musicals Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) and Lost in the Stars (1949).