If Joseph Wood Krutch had been writing about our drama in 1909 instead of 1939, one suspects that what is now his most valuable asset as a critic would have been lacking, or would not have been an asset. He has no ax to grind; he is the champion of no style or -ism. [In "The American Drama Since 1918" he] asks what the dramatist has tried to do, and then considers how far he has succeeded and what importance the aim may have. At a period when the drama is plainly entering on an era of eclecticism, such criticism, if shrewdly made, is of great value—and Mr. Krutch's criticism is shrewd, informed, and expressed with clarity.

On the other hand, at a time when the drama is fighting against a dead weight of tradition for a new and more or less widely acceptable form, as it was in the '90's in England and the first decade of the century here, that critic is probably most valuable who is a champion, who is combative rather than catholic. By the standards of Mr. Krutch's volume, G. B. Shaw was a bad critic—but how useful (as Mr. Krutch would be the first to admit)….

I, for one, think [Krutch] greatly overrates Odets, and rather underrates the importance of a man like George Kaufman. It is quite true, as he points out, that Kaufman's wit, like Wilde's, "gives the lie to the famous moral of the play as a whole." Kaufman doesn't write true satire, which he defines as "what closes on Saturday night." But Kaufman, like Cohan, whom Mr. Krutch does not mention, and Craven are writing in a direct American tradition of comedy, and the persistence of the type is plainly indicative of an audience demand which cannot be ignored, while the increasing skill with which we have handled this type has contributed enormously to our general level of craftsmanship.

If one were to find fault with a book so excellent and critically acute as this one, it would be, I feel, along these lines. Like many others who have written of drama, Professor Krutch too often approaches a play with a literary yardstick and measures it for its survival value, and in that process unconsciously ignores two facts—one, that no play has survival value unless it is based on good theatrical craftsmanship, and good theatrical craftsmanship has to be developed first in the popular play-house; and, two, the dramatist, like the journalist, writes primarily for the hour, and his deepest satisfaction is in the immediate response. The theater is not literature alone; it is actors, audience, a mood, an emotion of the moment. And a history of drama over two decades, or ten decades, inevitably leaves much out which ignores this fact….

The full story of any decade of drama cannot be told by cool, critical analysis alone, nor even, perhaps, some of its most promising tendencies detected, in the work of the "best" writers, without reference to the popular theater.

But perhaps Mr. Krutch would disclaim the intention of trying to write so broad a history, and we should admit his imposed limitations, and congratulate him, and ourselves, on the high merits of his work.