Four Verse Plays

After some years as a teacher and a journalist, Maxwell Anderson turned to drama in 1923, achieving his first success with What Price Glory? in 1924, a World War I comedy cowritten with Laurence Stallings. During his long and successful career as a dramatist, Anderson produced historical dramas, patriotic plays, musicals, fantasies, and a thriller. Perhaps his best piece is Winterset (1935), a play Inspired by the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Anderson's first play was a verse drama. Beginning with Elizabeth the Queen (1940), his most famous historical drama, he employed for many years an irregular blank verse, typical of his attempt to bring high seriousness to the Broadway stage. Critics have not been enthusiastic about Anderson's work, and his plays are seldom revived today, but in his heyday-especially the 1930s-his plays repeatedly succeeded in the commercial theater. Anderson won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Both Your Houses (1933) and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Winterset (1935) and High Tor (1937).