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The Critics' Choice
Eighty years ago, playwright Maxwell Anderson, fresh off a Pulitzer Prize, wrote his finest work.
By Milo Smith
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Photos courtesy of the Elwyn B. Robinson Dept. of Special Collections at the UND Chester Fritz Library
Twenty years after Maxwell Anderson graduated from UND in 1911, he was on a roll in New York City. The 1930s started with the New York premiere of the first of his Tudor dramas, "Elizabeth the Queen," and ended with "Key Largo" in 1939, the basis for the 1948 Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall film of the same name.
Anderson’s creative output from 1933 to 1936 took his talent to its highest level, putting him on par, according to biographer Alfred S. Shivers, with Eugene O’Neil, the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and Nobel laureate in Literature. By Shivers’ reckoning, “[Anderson’s] only superior in tragic drama in America was O’Neill, whom he surpassed, however, in having the crucial gift of poetry; therefore, Anderson’s graceful dialogue lifts the spirit and imagination whereas O’Neil’s does not.” (“Maxwell Anderson,” Shivers, 1976)
Eighty years ago, in the fall of 1935, Anderson’s "Winterset" debuted, believed by many to be his crowning achievement, and one that found inspiration in a chance conversation with an old UND chum.
Early Days
That Anderson might one day be the toast of Broadway was not entirely evident during his UND days, although it was written in the 1912 Dakota annual that Anderson “…was never known to lose confidence in the world’s appreciation.”
Anderson was an Arts major at UND, edited the 1912 annual that included several of his poems and a short story, was a founding member of the Sock and Buskin Society, a theatrical group organized by Professor Frederick H. Koch, and worked for the Grand Forks Herald newspaper.
Though he would write two senior plays at UND that showed a hint of his future career, upon graduation Anderson, now married to his college sweetheart, Margaret Haskett, took a job as the principal and English teacher at Minnewaukan, a small North Dakota town near Devils Lake.
The Andersons lasted only two years in Minnewaukan. Maxwell was dismissed for sharing his anti-war sentiments with students on the eve of World War I, so the family moved to California where Maxwell attended Stanford University to secure his master’s degree in English. His thesis bore the title “Immortality in the Plays and Sonnets of Shakespeare.”
Anderson would again turn to teaching to pay the bills, first at a San Francisco high school and then at Whittier College, where his pacifism again put him on the wrong side of the administration. Though regional and national publications were publishing his poems, it did not pay the bills, so Anderson found work in the newspaper business, eventually landing a job in New York City at the end of 1918.
Anderson as a young playwright.
Elwyn B. Robinson Dept. of Special Collections at the UND Chester Fritz Library
The Roaring ’20s
Anderson worked in New York as an editorial and review writer for New Republic, then the daily Globe and eventually the New York World. He also was a co-founder of The Measure: A Journal of Poetry. By any measure, Anderson found success in New York.
The motivation for becoming a playwright was, by Anderson’s own admission, a monetary one. A neighbor had received a $500 advance on his first play. After hearing it read aloud, Anderson was not impressed and figured he could do better.
His first effort, "White Desert," however, was a flop. Based on his wife’s story about her parents’ struggle with a mining claim in North Dakota, Anderson did, however, get his $500 advance for the play. "White Desert" is notable for Anderson’s decision to write in blank verse, the first example of what biographer Shivers calls the “glorious Andersonian compromise.” If Anderson could not make money with his first love, poetry, he would instead periodically write plays in blank verse, a nod to his literary hero Shakespeare.
Though "White Desert" closed after only 12 performances, it led to his first Broadway hit, the World War I comedy-drama "What Price Glory," written with fellow New York World writer Laurence Stallings, in 1924. Besides being a hit, the play is also notable for the uproar it caused for its use of profanity. Religious groups, the mayor of New York, and the U.S. District Attorney objected to the coarse language. Audiences, however, loved the play and it ran for more than 400 performances. That success allowed Anderson to quit his newspaper and poetry magazine jobs and focus on being a full-time dramatist.
The rest of his plays of the 1920s were not written in verse. Outside of one, "Saturday’s Children" (1927), none were very successful either.
Prime Decade
Anderson hit on a way to return to his beloved verse at the start of the 1930s. He came to realize that poetic tragedies were rarely written about current events and in current times. Thus he wrote the period drama "Elizabeth the Queen" (1930).
In 1933, Anderson won the Pulitzer Prize for "Both Your Houses," a political satire in which the protagonist, freshman Representative Alan McClean of Nevada, fights a losing battle against pork-barrel spending.
"Both Your Houses" showed Anderson’s versatility as he again abandoned his preference to write in blank verse. He would return to that form with two other plays in 1933, "Mary of Scotland" and "Valley Forge."
The fact that he wrote two plays and opened a third in the same year is an impressive feat, especially when you consider that Anderson wrote everything long-hand (And not in very good handwriting at that: The Maxwell Anderson Papers in the Chester Fritz Library include a diary kept during the writing of "Mary of Scotland" — completed in just five weeks — in which his typist, second wife Gertrude, writes that she was “cursing” trying to read his scribbles). To add to Anderson’s legend as a tireless writer, he also penned two movie screenplays in 1933, "Death Takes a Holiday" and "We Live Again."
Winterset
In 1935, Anderson would debut what critics hold up as his finest play, "Winterset." Anderson had believed that it would be difficult to write a verse play in a contemporary setting, theorizing that poetic verse in a modern setting would detract from the realism he wanted the audience to experience without it having a far-away feeling. Despite his own misgivings, "Winterset" was a poetic tragedy set under the Brooklyn Bridge in a slum neighborhood of Depression-era New York City.
"Winterset" was inspired by the Sacco-Vanzetti affair in which two Italian-born anarchists were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the armed robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory in 1920. It became widely believed that the men had been wrongly convicted, but they were still executed in 1927.
In a 1956 taped interview with the Oral History Office at Columbia University, Anderson credited an old UND classmate with sparking his interest in writing "Winterset." Anderson told the interviewer that a Boston lawyer and “old friend” named Montgomery had told him that the judge who sentenced Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was “just about out of his mind.” Anderson told the interviewer, “That really gave me the idea for the judge, and then for the rest of it.”
The impressive staging of "Winterset" at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City in 1935.
Elwyn B. Robinson Dept. of Special Collections at the UND Chester Fritz Library
In "Winterset," protagonist Mio, played by Anderson’s friend Burgess Meredith, is searching for evidence that his father did not commit the murder for which he was executed. His search leads him to a slum under a massive bridge where a witness to the murder lives with his sister, Miriamne, who Mio falls in love with. The arrival of the raving Judge Gaunt at the end of the first act sets up the rest of the drama.
By the end of the third act, Mio has decided to withhold what he has learned about Miriamne’s brother’s involvement in the murder out of consideration for her. He expresses his love moments before being gunned down outside her apartment:
"Winterset" would receive the first-ever New York Drama Critics’ Circle award. The award came about because New York critics were dissatisfied with the annual winners of the Pulitzer Prize for drama. New York critics had been especially outraged that Anderson’s "Mary of Scotland" had been passed over in 1933 (source: dramacritics.org).
Burgess Meredith and Margo Albert starred as Mio Romagna and Miriamne Esdras in Anderson’s masterpiece, "Winterset."
Elwyn B. Robinson Dept. of Special Collections at the UND Chester Fritz Library
The critics who gathered to pick the first winner included such notables as Robert Benchley, Walter Winchell and Brooks Atkinson. They chose "Winterset" over Robert Sherwood’s "Idiot’s Delight," which took that year’s Pulitzer.
In his acceptance speech, Anderson acknowledged that his play was not a unanimous choice, saying he was not sorry that there were dissenting votes.
“I am aware that "Winterset" is far from a perfect play,” Anderson said. “It’s an experiment, an attempt to twist raw, modern reality to the shape and meaning of poetry.
“… Still I like it better than any other play I’ve had my name on. Even a playwright’s reach should exceed his grasp occasionally, and fools who rush in where wise men fear to tread will sometimes find themselves in the vanguard of wisdom.”
Anderson would follow up his masterpiece with another New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for "High Tor" in 1936. Anderson would write six more plays before the end of the 1930s, including "Knickerbocker Holiday," a musical with composer Kurt Weill that showed off another side of Anderson’s versatility.
A Musical
"Knickerbocker Holiday" ran for only 168 performances, but its lasting legacy has been "September Song." Sung by Walter Huston as the villain Peter Stuyvesant, it has been covered by many of music’s biggest stars, including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and James Brown. Huston’s granddaughter, Oscar-winner Angelica Huston, even put her own stamp on the song, singing it in 2012 on the NBC television show "Smash."
One of the fascinating items in the Maxwell Anderson papers at the Chester Fritz Library is the original handwritten manuscript of "Knickerbocker Holiday." Even if you can decipher Anderson’s handwriting, you won’t find the famous song in this draft of the play. "September Song" was added at the request of Huston, who felt his character should have a solo song. Anderson and Weill wrote it in just a couple of hours (source: Lives of the Great Songs, Tim De Lisle (Editor), 1995, Trafalgar Square Publishing).
With "Key Largo" in 1939, Anderson’s most creative and most prolific period came to an end. He would write many more plays with varying success. The most notable would be"Joan of Lorraine" (1946), "Anne of a Thousand Days" (1948) and "The Bad Seed" (1954).
Joan of Arc
"Joan of Lorraine" bears mention as the only play of his own that Anderson adapted for the screen. In fact, in negotiating with Ingrid Bergman to star on Broadway, he promised her the lead in the film as well. Bergman, already a star from "Casablanca" (1942) and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1943), and an Oscar winner for "Gaslight" (1944), won a Tony award for the role of Mary Grey, an actress playing Joan of Arc in the play-within-a-play structure of "Joan of Lorraine."
Though he co-wrote the screenplay for the movie "Joan of Arc," Anderson was not happy with the outcome. The play-within-a-play structure was dropped for the 1948 movie, and Anderson was particularly unhappy that director Victor Fleming and Bergman changed much of his dialogue. He is said to have called Bergman a “big, dumb, goddamn Swede!” (Although the source of this quote is indeterminate, Anderson did write to reviewer John Mason Brown that “She (Bergman) had the power to wreck it and she did. Moreover, she’s completely unscrupulous.” (“Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958,” Edited by Laurence G. Avery, 1977.))
The Bad Seed
In 1954, Anderson had one last hit, "The Bad Seed." Anderson called the adaption of William March’s novel a “pot-boiler,” done in the name of making money. But biographer Shivers says Anderson “does not give himself enough credit” for the gripping tale of a murderous child.
Then again Anderson appeared to never be satisfied with his work. He told the interviewer from the Oral History Collection at Columbia University in 1956, “I don’t think I ever wrote a masterpiece. I’m still hoping to write a good one.” (“Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958”)
Critics and theatergoers who returned two and three times to see "Winterset" in 1935 would likely disagree.
Anderson, his second wife, Gertrude, and their daughter, Hesper. Hesper was nominated for an Oscar in 1987 for co-writing the movie Children of a Lesser God. She also wrote a book, South Mountain Road, in 2002 detailing her mother’s suicide.
Elwyn B. Robinson Dept. of Special Collections at the UND Chester Fritz Library
Love Letter to a University
By the winter of 1958, Anderson was suffering from the flu and had to cancel a planned trip to Grand Forks to receive an honorary doctorate from his alma mater on the 75th anniversary of the school’s founding. Anderson had been back to the state only once since leaving in 1913. He’d driven a car from California to New York in 1947 and took a detour to Minnewaukan and Grand Forks.
When he realized he would not be able to attend the November 1958 UND event, Maxwell penned his “Love Letter to a University” (the original document is part of the Maxwell Anderson Papers at the Chester Fritz Library).
“By my own standards,” Anderson wrote, “I have not gone very far or achieved very much, but as a farmer or banker I’d have been a most unhappy man — and so I write this note of grateful appreciation to my alma mater, thanking it for being there when I needed it so badly, and for supplying hope to the current crop of youngsters as they come to it from the windy plains.”
Three months later, Maxwell Anderson died at the age of 70 after suffering a stroke. His family amended a verse from his poem Epilogue (1924) for his tombstone:
The handwritten diary Anderson kept while writing Mary of Scotland is one of the treasures contained in the Maxwell Anderson Papers at the Chester Fritz Library.
The Anderson Files
In the two years before he died, Maxwell Anderson began donating a treasure trove of documents to the Chester Fritz Library. The photos of set and costume designs and notebooks containing his handwritten manuscripts and diaries give a fascinating look into the way Anderson worked during his years as a playwright and screenwriter.
Curt Hanson, head of the Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections, says the department had been started only a few years before Anderson began donating material in 1956.
“Our department began with members of the History Department going out and talking with people, sending letters, and soliciting collections,” said Hanson. “Maxwell Anderson, being a very prominent alum of the University, is one of the people who was approached.”
Hanson says one of his favorite parts of the collection is Anderson’s handwritten manuscript for his play "The Bad Seed." Though Anderson dismissed it as a “pot-boiler,” the play about a murderous child was a hit that ran for 334 performances on Broadway. It was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1956, and may have been the inspiration for the 1992 movie "The Good Son," starring Macaulay Culkin.
The original “Love Letter to a University,” sent by Anderson to UND shortly before his death, is also on permanent display on the fourth floor of the Chester Fritz library.
Hanson says the Maxwell Anderson Papers fit perfectly with the department’s mission to provide access to historical materials. “We are trying to preserve history, historical materials, that anyone, whether they be a student, an alum, or a prominent theatre historian, can come and look at.”
