Bom in 1927 in New York, playwright Neil Simon created a dozen popular plays before the production of Biloxi Blues. It is the second in a set of autobiographical plays-specifically, in a trilogy consisting of Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), and Broadway Bound (1986). The play itself details the experiences of Eugene Morris Jerome while he served in the United States Army during World War II. Unlike most war productions, Biloxi Blues focuses not on issues of combat, but rather on the training that young soldiers receive. Throughout the course of the work, Eugene learns both how to be a better soldier and how to be a better man. Faced with such sociological issues as anti-Semitism and racism, he acquires his own sense of moral responsibility for the times in which he lives.
The draft. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Burke-Wadsworth Bill into law, he initiated the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, the nation's first peacetime military draft. Although the United States had not yet entered into World War II, the war in Europe ominously underscored the need for military preparation.
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