His most significant accomplishment was
Winterset, a contemporary drama set in verse.
Anderson looked upon the theater as a religious institution devoted entirely to the exaltation of the spirit of man. At its best, he wrote in Off Broadway: Essays About the Theatre (1947), "the theatre is the central artistic symbol of the struggle of good and evil within men. The teaching is that the struggle is eternal and unremitting, that the forces which tend to drag men down are always present, always ready to attack, that the forces which make for good cannot sleep through a night without danger." While he wrote only for the Broadway stage, he viewed the theater above and beyond entertainment in terms of its function in society, which was to point out and celebrate the good in people's confused and often desperate lives. A champion of democracy, he made many of his heroes represent ideas of liberty and justice.
Maxwell Anderson was born on 15 December 1888 on the farm of his maternal grandmother, near Atlantic, Pennsylvania. His father, William Lincoln Anderson, was a Baptist minister who moved every year or two to parishes about Pennsylvania and the states of the Middle West.
This is a free page. This page contains 185 words. This
biography contains 9,573 words (approx. 32 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Maxwell Anderson Access Pass.
