Robert Anderson

Robert Anderson 1805-71, American army officer, defender of Fort Sumter , b. near Louisville, Ky., grad. West Point, 1825. He fought in the Black Hawk, Seminole, and Mexican wars and was promoted to major in 1857. In Nov., 1860, he took command of the U.S. force in the harbor of Charleston, S.C., where he distinguished himself in the Fort Sumter controversy. Anderson, made a brigadier general in the regular army (May, 1861), commanded the Dept. of Kentucky (June-Oct.). He retired from active service in Oct., 1863. In Feb., 1865, he was brevetted major general for his gallant service in the defense of Fort Sumter.

Anderson, Robert [Woodruff] (b. 1917), playwright. Born in New York and educated at Harvard, he won the National Theatre Conference's prize for his 1944 play Come Marching Home. His first Broadway success was Tea and Sympathy (1953), one of the first American plays to approach the topic of homophobia. Anderson's other long run was his bill of one‐acters, You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running (1967). His other works include All Summer Long (1954), Silent Night, Lonely Night (1959), The Days Between (1965 and 1979), I Never Sang for My Father (1968), and Solitaire/Double Solitaire (1970). On the strength of Tea and Sympathy he was made a member of the Playwrights' Company, but his early promise was never realized. Anderson also wrote many scripts for radio and screenplays.

Anderson, Robert Woodruff (1917– ), American dramatist, whose first play, Come Marching Home (1945), was awarded first prize in a National Theatre Conference contest. He is best known for Tea and Sympathy (NY, 1953; London, 1957); his treatment of the victimization of a schoolboy wrongly accused of homosexuality was seen as an oblique comment on McCarthyism. His later plays include All Summer Long (1957); a double bill, Silent Night/Lonely Night (1959); You Know I Can't Hear You when the Water's Running (1967; London, 1968), four short plays which achieved his longest run; and I Never Sang for My Father (1968; London, 1970), about a middle-aged man's fraught relationship with his father. Anderson's plays, though they sometimes verge on sentimentality, deal compassionately with the problems inherent in human relationships, especially within the family.