The successful playwright, whose dramatic scope is never outwardly wide, whose characters are as commonplace as old shoes, and whose subject matter rarely rises above the ordinary routine of small-town life, necessarily must possess compensating gifts. William Motter Inge … has an abundance of such gifts. Possessed of extraordinary perception, sensitivity, and compassion, he has the rare and admirable trait of expressing the frustrations and dilemmas of "the so-called little man without being patronizing and without the sentimentalist's knack of killing him with a dubious sort of kindness, à la Saroyan." His dramatic aim, as expressed in a series of midwestern and southwestern community plays, is modest but almost invariably true. As the creator of a large number of well-realized, though ordinary men, women, and children, Inge has portrayed the fortunes and misfortunes of their domestic lives with integrity and sympathy…. [Beginning with Come Back, Little Sheba] his career has revealed Inge as "the modest poet of the American landscape of failure and near failure." Although limited in range and depth of technique and style, Inge's stagecraft has captivated both stage and motion picture audiences by its familiar realism. (pp. 211-12)
[Come Back, Little Sheba] is honest Americana. As a bare, almost clinical characterization of a middle-aged and intellectually mismated couple, the play exhibits a young play-wright's genuine concern for hapless people, beset by secret frustrations and dreams of a better life—for small-town natives who, transplanted to a small midwestern city, live lives "of quiet desperation," knowing in themselves that their narrow world will not improve, yet clinging to hope. (p. 212)
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