A teacher, journalist, and poet, Maxwell Anderson brought to the theater of the twentieth century an awareness of contemporary events as well as a poet's depth of feeling and sense of language. Though skilled in writing for the theater of realism, he believed that poetic tragedy alone was the proper aim of American dramatists. A romantic at heart, Anderson had a penchant for the historical past and universal themes, treating Elizabethan subjects in an archaic dramatic form. Yet, as scholar Donald Heiney observes, Anderson realistically converted "his historical figures into modern personalities with modern psychologies, and his political liberalism and cutting irony mark him as a typical American writer of his generation." Anderson came to prominence in the 1930s, writing Both Your Houses (1933), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize; Winterset (1935), winner of the newly established New York Drama Critics Circle Award; High Tor (1937), which also won a...