American Literature: American Playwrights

From The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English
Lorraine Hansberry turns the raw material of family history (her father's decision in 1938 to defy Chicago's restrictive real-estate covenants) into a play whose appeal derives in part from the specificity of its focus (on the Younger family) and the universality of its main concern (dreams deferred).

From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A play by Tennessee Williams, first performed in New York in 1955 and awarded a pulitzer prize. It was revised for a revival in 1974.

From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A play by Arthur, Miller, first performed and published in 1949. It won instant critical acclaim, running for 742 performances at the Morosco Theatre in New York and winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A trilogy of plays by Eugene O'Neill, based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus, and first produced in New York in 1931. The 13-act trilogy is set in a small New England coastal town at the close of the Civil War.

From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A play by Thornton Wilder, performed in New York in 1938 and awarded a pulitzer prize. Its three acts treat Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death, respectively, in the small New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners and focus on two families in particular: the Gibbses and the Webbs.

From Brewer's Curious Titles
A historical drama (1953) by the US playwright Arthur Miller (b. 1915) about the witchcraft hysteria that swept through Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

Following the development of opera, operetta, and the musical play (or musical, as we now know it), American composers such as Jerome Kern (1885-1945) and Oscar Hammerstein (1846-1919) became very popular.

From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A play by Edward Albee, first performed in New York in 1962. The first of his three-act dramas, it is also the most admired of his plays.

U.S. dramatist. Her works include the plays The Little Foxes (1939), The Searching Wind (1944), and the autobiographical Scoundrel Time (1976).

American playwright noted for many collaborations, including Dinner at Eight (1932) with Edna Ferber and You Can't Take It with You (1936) with Moss Hart.

American playwright who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Millennium Approaches (1992), the first part of his trilogy Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

U.S. dramatist and film director. His plays include Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), American Buffalo (1976), Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), and The Spanish Prisoner (1998).

American playwright whose works include Death of a Salesman (1949), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Crucible (1953).

U.S. dramatist. His works, which are notable for their emotional power and psychological analysis, include Desire under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928), Mourning becomes Elektra (1931), Long Day's Journey into Night (1941), and The Iceman Cometh (1946): Nobel prize for literature 1936.

American playwright whose lighthearted comedies of middle-class life include The Odd Couple (1965) and Lost in Yonkers (1991), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.

American playwright and novelist, b. Madison, Wis., grad. Yale (B.A., 1920) and Princeton (M.A., 1925). He received most of his early education in China, where his father was in the U.S. consular service.

Playwright, born in Columbus, Mississippi, USA. From an old Tennessee family (he adopted his first name by 1939 while in New Orleans), he was raised under the influence of his clergyman-grandfather.