In addition to Anderson they included Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, S.N. Behrman, Paul Green, and others. By contemporaries through the 1930s and 1940s none came to be more highly regarded than Anderson, and now after half a century it is clear that he is among the few in his generation who wrote plays whose value and interest will last.
The American playwrights who emerged in the 1920s were diverse, and among his contemporaries Anderson was unusual in several respects. He was more prolific and versatile than most writers in his or any age. During a career of just over three decades he produced thirty-three plays (about half the number he wrote), and they include comedies and tragedies, plays in verse and in prose, satires, musicals, and plays of social protest. More significantly, his conception of the drama was not common in his time. Ideas typical of the 1920s and later emphasized the relationship between a play and the outside world, which the play sought to imitate in either realistic or expressionistic fashion. Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (produced in 1924) with its verisimilar elements (for instance, its grapes that grow and change colors between the acts) is a fine example of the realistic play, and O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (produced in 1922) and Rice's The Adding Machine (produced in 1923) show the possibilities of expressionistic plays.
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