In the following excerpt, Frederick Carpenter theorizes on Anna Christie's popularity despite its flaws and suggests that its acclaim comes from its genuine mix of comedy and tragedy.

Anna Christie, produced exactly one year after The Emperor Jones, proved almost as popular. It was enthusiastically reviewed, and it ran for 117 performances, and it won for its author his second Pulitzer Prize. It was quickly made into a silent movie, and in 1929 was remade into a "talkie," with Greta Garbo in the title role. Thirty-three years later a large jury of film critics at the Seattle World's Fair voted this one of the fourteen best motion pictures ever produced in America. And this cinematic excellence suggests a reason for the play's popularity: it is one of the most perfectly romantic of O'Neill's early works. But the fact that both Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie won Pulitzer...