This play is often referred to as an example of Depression-era political thought, pointing out how the rich feed off the labor of the poor. Perhaps the purest example of the pro-labor movement in the 1930s is Clifford Odets’s 1935 play Waiting for Lefty, in which taxi drivers in a union hall discuss life and their place in it. It is available in the paperback Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays, published by Grove Press in 1993.

Anderson was often said to be the artistic successor of Eugene O’Neill, who also wrote about sweeping historical subjects. Many people consider O’Neill’s 1939 drama The Iceman Cometh, about an assortment of lower-class people in a run-down bar, to be his best work. It has been published by Vintage Books in a 1999 edition.

Anderson is remembered for his experiments writing dramas in blank verse. Readers will find his best examples of this style, written between 1929 and 1939, in Eleven Verse Plays, published in 1968 by Harcourt, Brace and World. Included are the favorites Winterset, Valley Forge, and Key Largo.

Anderson’s daughter, Hesper, is an accomplished screenwriter. She recently published her memoir of what it was like growing up with a famous writer and associating with the greatest literary figures of the thirties and forties. South Mountain Road: A Daughter’s Journey of Discovery, by Hesper Anderson, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2000.

Readers can gain a sense of what Anderson was thinking when he wrote this play and of his long and varied career from Dramatists in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912–1958. It was published by University of North Carolina Press in 1977.

One of the more recent biographies of Anderson is Nancy J. Doran Hazelton’s Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage, published in 1991 by Library Research Associates. As the title suggests, the focus is not on Anderson’s entire life but on a vibrant time in Broadway theater, the 1930s through the 1950s.

In 1947, at the height of Anderson’s career, da Capra Press compiled some of his major pieces about show business in Off Broadway: Essays about Theater.

This play is just one mentioned in Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression, by Malcolm Goldstein. It was published by Oxford University Press in 1974.