American Drama Between the Wars: American Drama Between the Wars (Cloth) (Twayne's critical history of American drama series) - Hardcover

This is a concise critical history of the era in which American dramatists developed a style of their own, distinct from their British counterparts and European forebears. The Little Theatre Movement receives close attention, as do major playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Lillian Hellman.

The great age of modern American drama can be understood only in terms of an unprecedented confluence of social and political forces, which catalyzed a new form of drama comparable to the achievements of Stanislavsky in Russia, Max Reinhardt in Berlin, Andre Antoine in Paris, and W.B. Yeats in Dublin. When in 1913 the Armory Exhibition presented the work of European artists Picasso, Brancusi, and Duchamp for the first time in the United States, the country's past aesthetic standards were irreparably fractured.