American Drama

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American Drama (Critical Survey of Drama)

Overview

Until the post-World War I era, American drama, confronted with religious hostility and then by economic necessity and academic indifference, struggled to come into its own as a respected literary genre at home and as a force that made itself felt on foreign stages. A commonplace of American literary history is that the plays of Eugene O’Neill, in Walter J. Meserve’s words, marked “America’s full-scale arrival into the modern drama of western civilization.”

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