Maxwell Anderson

Regarded in his heyday as the equal of Eugene O'Neill, playwright Maxwell Anderson has cyclically fallen and risen in public estimation since his death. His emphasis on historical drama has doomed him in periods when that genre is deemed irrelevant to contemporary issues; his anachronistic fondness for verse tragedy has often been regarded as artificial and self-conscious. Yet these same qualities set him apart from all other American playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century and made him an excellent collaborator in musical theater.

Anderson studied at the University of North Dakota and Stanford University. His first hit was a ribald World War I comedy written with Laurence Stallings, called What Price Glory? (1924). His next two plays, both from 1925, better indicated the course his career would take: First Flight, about Andrew Jackson, and The Buccaneer, about pirate Henry Morgan. His later major historical plays included Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Mary of Scotland (1934), Valley Forge (1934), Joan of Lorraine (1946), and Anne of the Thousand Days (1948). Anderson also had a populist side, even though he was always preoccupied with inner moral struggles. His plays Winterset (1935), inspired by the Sacco/Vanzetti case, and Key Largo (1939), about a man struggling for redemption after an act of cowardice, were both made into highly regarded films, although some critics thought Winterset was overly "poetic." More down-to-earth in its approach was The Bad Seed (1954), about an evil little girl. Anderson collaborated with composer <a href="spotify:artist:69a1b61a56mJlx8iAUMBsY">Kurt Weill</a> on two musicals: Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), set in the early days of New York City and featuring the popular "September Song," and Lost in the Stars (1949), an adaptation of Alan Paton's anti-apartheid novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Anderson won a Pulitzer Prize not for drama, but for Both Your Houses, a 1933 prose satire of the U.S. Congress.