Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 19231937 is a critical and political biography and a cultural and social history that focuses on Lawson s career in the theatre. Using a materialist methodology, Jonathan L. Chambers emphasizes the evolution and interplay of the playwright s artistic vision and political ideology, considering his art as both a documentation of this evolution and a product of the socio-political and cultural matrix in which he was immersed.

Spanning the playwright s career, the volume details Lawson s early...