Klappentext

This book focuses on the re-evaluation of four Maxwell Anderson plays within the context of the emergence of the New Woman and the perception of a marriage crisis in the United States during the 1920s. The four plays under consideration are White Desert (1923), Sea-Wife (1924), Saturday s Children (1927), and Gypsy (1929). These plays are largely forgotten and, even when the titles appear in Anderson scholarship, coverage has tended to be cursory and dismissive. This work represents a fresh approach and re-assessment of an American playwright who bore a significant impact on the drama of his time, serving not only to place Anderson s work more effectively within the context of American theatre during the 1920s, but also to bridge the gap between his work and the marriage-related plays of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.