Maxwell Anderson was to the American theatre what Schiller was to the German or Rostand to the French theatres. If not their equals, he contributed to the American stage a romantic drama exalted in spirit and idealistic in aim. Although adept at writing the drama of realism, he held that nothing less than poetic tragedy would suffice great theatre. He brought to the theatre of the twentieth century an obsolete form of verse drama, and, more important, made it an artistic and commercial success on some half-dozen occasions between 1930-1950. Almost alone in the American theatre since Eugene O'Neill, he attempted to rise beyond pedestrian realistic drama, striving to make tragedy prevail despite “untragic psychological and photographic viewpoints of the age” (S51, 678). Anderson believed with Goethe that dramatic poetry was man's greatest achievement and with Shaw that the theatre was a cathedral of the spirit, devoted to the exaltation of man. By challenging the leftist stage of the 1930s by means of poetic treatment, he reemphasized the role of individual heroics in a world in which the individual seemed to exist only as a representative of larger social forces. A romantic at heart, Anderson was drawn to the historical past and universal themes. Yet there is a modern quality to his work, for “even when he is treating Elizabethan subjects in an archaic dramatic form; he invariably converts his characters into modern personalities with modern psychologies, and his political liberalism and cutting irony mark him as a typical American writer of his generation” (S115, 369).

Anderson brought to the theatre “not only the journalist's and editor's awareness of contemporary events, and the poet's depth of feeling and sense of language but also the scholar's knowledge of the heritage of the theater from Aeschylus to Ibsen” (S58, 149). And while he wrote almost as many forms of drama as Polonius outlined to Hamlet, following the muses of comedy, tragedy, melodrama, fantasy, and social protest, his plays tend to fall generally into three categories: realistic prose drama, historical verse drama, and contemporary drama in verse. His dramatic canon includes Both Your Houses (1933, Pulitzer Prize), Winterset (first winner, in 1935, of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award), High Tor (1937, Drama Critics' Circle Award) and other outstanding works, such as Elizabeth the Queen (1930) and Mary of Scotland (1933). His crowning achievement was Winterset, in which he popularized the use of blank verse in contemporary drama.

Anderson was born 15 December 1888, in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, the son of a Baptist minister who moved from successive pastorates in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, and North Dakota. His mother's main occupation “was packing up and following my father, who usually went ahead to hold down the pulpit” (S162, 303). The family was Scotch and Irish, mostly Scotch. They had a library of books, Dickens and most of the English poets; and Anderson familiarized himself with these and other books at an early age. From the age of thirteen, he worked each summer as a farm hand; and for a few weeks as a printer's devil, playfully printing for himself a card that read: “Cymbeline, Blackfriar's Theater. Admit One” (S23, 1). In high school he discovered Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare, played the violin and the piano, and belonged to a male quartet. He received a bachelor's degree in three years from the University of North Dakota, where he played right guard on the varsity football team, joined the dramatic society, and wrote two senior musical comedies (Lost Labor's Love when he was a freshman and The Masque of Pedagogues in his third and last year), while working at the copy desk of a newspaper to support himself. He received a master's degree from Stanford University, where in 1914 he taught while earning his degree in English. His master's thesis was entitled “Immortality in the Plays and Sonnets of Shakespeare.” Dismissed from various teaching and newspaper jobs for expressing pacifist opinions and/or writing unorthodox editorials about World War I, he headed to New York in 1918 at the invitation of Alvin Johnson of the editorial board of the New Republic, who was impressed with poems and an essay Anderson had submitted. Anderson joined the periodical's staff as an apprentice editor, his tenure dependent upon his “ability to tone down to a judicial attitude” (S162, 9). He left to become an editorial writer with the New York Evening Globe, and finally took a position with Pulitzer's liberal morning paper the New York World, then the haven of many men who later achieved literary distinction. He was at that time one of the founders of the poetry magazine the Measure. In his early career, his primary interest was poetry, for which he received recognition (S162, xvi.). A volume of his poems, You Who Have Dreams, was published in 1925 by Simon and Schuster. Anderson believed a playwright's works alone should speak for him and granted few interviews. In response to an early questionnaire sent to him by Burns Mantle, he alleged: “When a man starts peddling personal stuff about himself, they should send a squad of strong-arm worms after him, because he's dead” (S12, 71).

It has been said that the renascence of dramatic poetry in America came about at the New York World in 1923, when the thirty-five-year-old Anderson turned his poetic pen to the writing of White Desert. He had written verse since age fifteen, and sold some on occasion more recently, although he never made much money at it. After almost three years at the World, after realizing that he was not going to be a success as a poet, he wrote a play in verse with no thought of production, because “I didn't know anything about the theatre” (S162, 307). He became interested in writing plays by chance. His neighbor John Howard Lawson had received an impressive advance (＄500) for Roger Bloomer. After hearing it read, Anderson decided, “If that's a play, I can write one” (S162, xvi).

White Desert, Anderson's first professionally staged play, was a poetic study of jealousy, and written “in verse because I was weary of plays in prose that never lifted from the ground. It failed, and I did not come back to verse again until I had discovered that poetic tragedy had never been successfully written about its own place and time” (A57, 37). He next turned his attention to the bitter World War I recollections of literary editor Laurence Stallings in their off hours at the World and to the service of prose realism. What Price Glory? (1924), their collaboration, made theatrical history as one of the first works to treat the war in an anti-romantic manner. The show was a phenomenal success. Capitalized at about ＄10,000, it made a profit of about ＄10,000 a week (S162, 313). And Anderson, at age 35, quit the World to devote his time to playwriting. With a wife and three sons to support, he could not have done this before. To celebrate his success, he bought a cane and brandished it in a walk up and down Fifth Avenue (A57). He never returned to the office.

During the 1920s, Anderson wrote in collaboration with Stallings two historical plays in prose: First Flight (1925), about a young General Andrew Jackson, and The Buccaneer (1926), about Sir Henry Morgan, the pirate. Both plays had short runs on Broadway. A series of more conventional comedies and dramas followed, the most successful of which was Saturday's Children (1927), written alone and in prose, a sentimental comedy dealing with a young married couple and their solution to domestic problems. Anderson collaborated with another journalist, Harold Hickerson, on Gods of the Lightning (1928), a thesis play that took as its subject matter the social injustice of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which left the critics unimpressed. After the failure of Gypsy (1929), a realistic play of modern city life which was written independently, came a series of historical and pseudo-historical plays in verse. Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Mary of Scotland (1933), and Anne of the Thousand Days (1948) comprise his Tudor trilogy, though they were not written chronologically. American history inspired Night over Taos (1932) and Valley Forge (1934); Austrian history, The Masque of Kings (1937); and the Middle Ages, Joan of Lorraine (1946). Returning to the Sacco-Vanzetti material, Anderson created tragic poetry out of the stuff of his own time with Winterset (1935).

Anderson took an early dislike to the power that producers had to choose and reject plays. In 1938 he organized the Playwrights' Company in association with Robert E. Sherwood, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, S. N. Behrman, and attorney John F. Wharton. The group presented their own plays, as well as those of others, and prospered as a major producing organization until 1960, Anderson's plays making the most consistently successful contributions. Another more deeply rooted dislike was directed toward the drama critics with whom Anderson openly argued dissenting opinions, although they twice had presented him their Drama Critics' Award.

Anderson spoke and wrote at length about poetry in the theatre. He published The Essence of Tragedy and other Footnotes (1929) and Off Broadway (1947), two volumes that collect his essays and prefaces. Within the essays are his principles of playwriting (studied in depth by Halline (S69), Bailey (S108), Sampley (S72), and Buchanan (S125, S144, S203), formulated after several failures, and after reading Aristotle's Poetics, to assure himself of more than haphazard success with his own efforts. Halline observes, “To have evolved a profound and noble theory of drama, rooted in the classic age and transcending the present, is a significant achievement in criticism; … a body of drama measuring up to this ideal should prove to be a lasting contribution to art” (81).

Anderson's plays were written for the Broadway theatre; they were commercial ventures subjected to the demands of the practical stage. He said that he learned the truth about playwriting and supporting a company and family from Moliere's popular plays. When a tragedy failed, the French playwright would hastily write a farce to fill the theatre, even writing a flimsy musical with Corneille. But whatever Moliere wrote, “he did it as well as he could, aiming at quality and perfection as well as immediate receipts. I, too, have done as well as I could with everything I've tried” (A65).

The bulk of Anderson's plays were written in a wooden shack, ten by twelve feet, behind his home in the Nyack region of Rockland County, New York. He would spend six or seven months plotting a play in his mind before actually writing it in longhand, neatly in ink, in a ledger book; revising the manuscript two or more times after it had been typed (S128, 29). His advice to budding playwrights: play structure is more important than playwriting; familiarize yourself with Aristotle's recognition scene; spend three times the amount of time planning the play than writing it. An eight-volume History of England by George L. Craig and Charles MacFarlane, published in 1821, was the principal source for his history plays. Anderson wrote the scripts for a number of successful films, including All Quiet on the Western Front and Rain. Several of his plays were transferred to film. He wrote for radio and television, yet his primary devotion was to the theatre.

At the time of his death in 1959, he was engaged in arranging for the production of a new play, entitled Madonna and Child. He was also in the early stages of writing the book for a musical with a contemporary New York setting, Art of Love, based on Ovid's poems. During a career that spanned some three decades, he had written thirty-five plays; thirty-three were produced, twenty-seven on Broadway (S200). Twenty-nine were published, and many were produced in European capitals and translated into more than a dozen foreign languages.

Alfred S. Shivers (S160), in an extensive critical analysis of Anderson's plays, discusses three periods in the playwright's career: 1923-29, collaborator and apprentice; 1930-38, successful poetic dramatist and political idealist; and 1939-59, realist and defender of democracy. From 1923-29, Anderson, alone or with a succession of co-authors, essayed various types of popular work—prose realism, comedy, a thesis play—in his development as a dramatic poet. Most failed. His excursions into socialism were strong but short-lived, dismissed by the 1930s. Although his first successes came from plays written in the service of prose realism, such as What Price Glory? (1924) about the common American soldier in action during World War I, this type of drama was antithetical to his tragic view of life and his exalted aspirations as a dramatist. He did, nonetheless, continue to write in prose when themes concerned topical issues. For example, Both Your Houses, written in 1933 when dissatisfaction with government was strong, was a political satire, a savage attack on congressional logrolling and political apathy.

During the 1930-38 period, Anderson wrote the poetic tragedies, for which he is best remembered—happy blends of his love for poetry, tragedy, history, and romance. Elizabeth the Queen (1930), the first successful drama of the modern American theatre to be written in verse, owes its success in part to Anderson's discovery of the Aristotelian principles and to his powerful, idealistic characters, who are caught in the quicksands of politics and human evil. This is the period when he was most influenced by Shakespeare. Borrowing from the romance of the past for the ready-made figures, Anderson wrote a number of other historical romances in blank verse such as Mary of Scotland (1933), in which the complexity of the characters developed unevenly, as did the quality of the poetry. These works seemed to confirm that only the past could be conceived in poetic terms, that modern life, indeed, was unsuited to that degree of elevating that makes verse a natural medium of expression. Yet these were but “experiments,” leading to Winterset (1935) which attempted to treat the material of contemporary life in a manner more richly imaginative than the method of realism would accord. It was “more of an experiment than I could wish,” Anderson wrote, “for the great masters themselves never tried to make tragic poetry out of the stuff of their own time” (A58, 54). In this return to the Sacco-Vanzetti material, action and social-political argument are subordinated to a brooding and poetic treatment of guilt, justice, and revenge. Much of the dialogue is in the form of blank verse, allowing the lowest of characters, as in Shakespeare, to be both poet and philosopher. The play was awarded the first Drama Critics' Award, and in his acceptance speech, Anderson (S162) modestly acknowledged that his “experiment” was far from a perfect play. “That it succeeded so far as it did with its audiences, and that it won so many friends, is due as much to superlative direction, setting and acting as to anything I contributed” (295). The play was criticized by scholars and popular critics for the mass of verbiage—the too-easy verbiage to which he was prone—and the patently inadequate conclusion. Gassner (S51) concluded that Winterset was “touched by greatness in language, characterization, and atmosphere, the second act, one of the memorable pieces of modern playwriting” (682).

High Tor (1937), the best of Anderson's comedies, successfully combines blank verse with colloquial prose. Both audiences and critics were delighted by the playfully imaginative piece, which attested to Anderson's versatility while winning him a second Drama Critics' Circle Award.

Anderson was primarily a man of the theatre, who adapted himself to the requirements of the stage rather than demanding that the stage adapt to him. Starting in 1939, after realizing that his prose was better than his poetry and more viable in terms of box office receipts, he began compromising his ideals, turning his attention for the most part to realism and “consciously patriotic war plays, few of which amounted to anything as art.” (S160, 134). As Shivers (S160) notes, Knickerbocker Holiday (1939), a musical satire written in collaboration with Kurt Weill, marks the end of Anderson's sound productivity.

Between 1925 and 1940, the most prolific years of his career, Anderson was acknowledged as one of the most eminent and exciting playwrights in America. He dominated the Thirties with his verse plays Elizabeth the Queen, Mary of Scotland, Valley Forge, High Tor, and Winterset. Both Your Houses won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. Winterset (1935) and High Tor (1937) received the first two Drama Critics' Circle Awards. During the 1936-37 season he opened three shows: The Wingless Victory (Dec. 36), High Tor (Jan. 37), and The Masque of Kings (Feb. 37). And in 1939 the Pasadena Playhouse, after devoting two summer festivals to Shakespeare and Shaw, turned to Anderson, staging eight of his plays. Between 1935 and 1955, when O'Neill's career was in a temporary decline, Anderson was considered America's leading playwright. Shivers (S160) acknowledges, “His only superior in tragic drama in America was O'Neill, whom he surpassed, however, in having the crucial gift of poetry; therefore, Anderson's graceful dialogue lifts the spirit and imagination, whereas O'Neill's does not” (141).

The theatre to Anderson was a religious institution devoted entirely to the exaltation of the spirit of man. It was the central artistic symbol of the struggle of good and evil within men, an affirmation that the good and evil in man are the good and evil of evolution, that men have within themselves the beasts from which they emerge and the God toward which they climb. Set a man on the stage, he wrote, and you know instantly where he stands morally with the race (A58, 34). Anderson looked upon the theatre above and beyond entertainment in terms of its function in society, which was “to point out and celebrate whatever is good and worth saying in our confused and often desperate generations” (S162, xviii). A champion of democracy, he made many of his heroes spokesmen for his ideas of liberty and justice.

By challenging the leftist stage of the 1930s, Anderson subjected his work to a barrage of critical assault, not only as a literary craftsman writing romantic and tragic plays in verse despite contemporary untragic psychological and photographic viewpoints, but by stressing the individual in an age of increasing collectivism. Measured by Marxist critics, his brand of anarchism made him a defeatist who derived “his popularity by escaping into the romantic past” (S58, 148). Clurman (S113) describes him as a quiet “anarchist” who treated all problems with soft “skepticism and considerable affection”; the tone of his plays consisting of “a gentle and melancholy moodiness”; concrete considerations tending “to dissolve in a sad and tender blur with a never altogether extinguishable Puritan Christianity dominant” (34). Similarly, Taylor (S140) observes a tentativeness which “suggests the scholar's tendency to hesitate in the face of generalizations, even to suspend judgment between conflicting alternatives … [which] is not to say that he does not have a passionate belief in the dignity of man” (48).

Anderson's successes and failures were neither uniform nor were his successes complete. Critics agree that Anderson's poetry is of uneven merit, his prose literary indulgent. And while few poets and critics seem to know what constitutes real dramatic verse, Miller and Frazer (S211) observe, “His use of verse was unique, and though devoid of rhyme, alliteration, assonance, or the meter of conventional blank verse in its broken-up prose line, he was able on occasion to adapt it to his characters with some measure of success” (133). Brown (R180), in his consideration of Winterset, acknowledges that “Mr. Anderson has tried to do matters much more than what he may or may not have succeeded in doing. His is the kind of play, although by no means the actual play, upon which the hope and glory of the future theatre rest” (152).

Flexner (S41) claims audiences in general “have been attracted to his work by its craftsmanship and its dramatic effectiveness”; which they know is an expression of his ideas, “uttered with candor and integrity; it represents the best he is capable of” (79). Miller (S135) stresses that it impossible to judge Anderson a critical or artistic failure, strongly praising high ideals and artistic sincerity and striking diversity, yet he concludes that the plays lack permanent universal appeal and remain the product of a gifted technician.

On the occasion of the Maxwell Anderson Centennial Celebration in 1988, Alan Anderson (S200) suggests reasons why his father's plays are not revived today: the themes are too intellectual; the productions are too expensive with their large casts and multiple sets; and the themes concern topical issues which now seem dated. As for his Dad's happy love affair with lofty rhetoric and poetic utterance, Anderson's son astutely continues, “Perhaps there is less hunger among today's theatre audiences for language that challenges our imaginative powers. … On the other hand, many of his staunch admirers single out language as one of their reasons for their continuing interest in his work” (172).