As one of the most outstanding and innovative playwrights of the 20th century, Elmer Rice made and sustained his reputation with a series of hit plays and provocative experimental work which, next to the output of Eugene O'Neill, remains the most varied canon of theatrical writing produced by an American dramatist. This reference book overviews his life and career and provides plot synopses and critical commentaries for his plays. The volume also provides cast and credit lists for major productions and an exhaustive bibliography of primary and secondary materials.

When critics of the...

Rachel Crothers had a fascinating and influential career as a woman playwright and director. She was a major part of Broadway history during the first half of the 20th century, when she wrote for leading actresses such as Tallulah Bankhead, Katharine Cornell, and Gertrude Lawrence. While she is primarily known for her plays, she also worked for a time in Hollywood, and many of her plays were filmed--some more than once.

This volume presents a biographical and critical overview of Crothers's life and career, along with synopses of her plays, descriptions of the critics' responses to each...

When "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" opened in 1984, August Wilson was unknown in theatre. By 1988 he was described as the foremost dramatist of the American black experience and was the most acclaimed playwright of his time by 1990. He is one of only seven American playwrights to win two Pulitzer prizes and one of only three black playwrights to receive that award. Remarkably, Wilson has been able to explore and communicate the American black experience, while also achieving a universality that attracts the white audiences needed for commercial success. Based on extensive research that...

Born in the Southside of Chicago in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry and her family moved to a large house in a white neighborhood in 1938. In order to live there, her father had to fight a civil rights case in the Supreme Court against segregationists. Her experiences with racial discrimination fueled her strong commitment to social justice and inspired her works. In 1959, her first-produced play, "A Raisin in the Sun," met the enthusiastic praise of Broadway critics and audiences alike. It was the first and longest running play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. When it won...

Best remembered today for her acclaimed 1928 expressionist drama Machinal, based in part on the infamous murder trial of Ruth Snyder, Sophie Treadwell was an innovative American dramatist whose career spanned almost 60 years and nearly 40 plays. A relentless experimenter in dramatic subjects, styles, and forms, Treadwell was one of a select number of American women playwrights who also actively produced and directed their own works. She was also a professional journalist, and she constantly used her writings to explore women's personal and social struggles for independence and...

Among the most commercially successful female playwrights of all times, Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) is best remembered as the author of "The Women" (1936), a biting social comedy. Beginning in 1942, she spent less of her time writing plays and turned instead to the wider stage of politics and world affairs. She was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, a congresswoman, and an ambassador to Italy during the Eisenhower administration.

This book traces her transition from playwright to politician to Catholic apologist. It uncovers for the first time plays, both early and late, that...

William Saroyan, one of the most prolific writers in America, was the first playwright to win simultaneously both the New York Drama Critics' Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize in playwriting for T"he Time of Your Life" in 1940. In spite of his success, he quickly disappeared from the public eye. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote plays but did not allow them to be produced or published. Shortly before his death in 1981, his "Play Things" was produced at Vienna's English Theatre.

This volume concentrates in one source the tremendous amount of information available about Saroyan's...