David Radavich, CENTER STAGE, Midwestern Plays and Playwrights, AGORA, May, 2004

he Midwest is often conceived of in the American psyche as an undramatic place: not the storied East, not the flamboyant South, and not the romantic West. 1950s television shows like The Nelsons and Father Knows Best seem situated there, whether they actually were or not. In fact, however, the Midwest has played a central rôle in American theatre since its rise as a region in the late nineteenth century. From its beginnings, the Midwest has shown a strong connection to realism and has proven particularly hospitable to women and African-American playwrights. Indeed, an astonishing number of major dramatists have enduring ties to the Midwest: Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Lorraine Hansberry, and a host of more recent playwrights. A survey of twentieth-century American drama, contrary to one’s expectations, finds the Midwest front and center.

Defining the Midwest geographically has taken longer than other, historically established regions. John T. Flanagan, writing in 1961, called the midwestern states “probably the most heterogeneous group in terms of population in the entire Union” (qtd. in Stryk vii). Consensus in recent years has settled on the Great Lakes states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, plus the states of the upper Mississippi River basin, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. On the West, the border falls geographically along a hundred-mile strip that runs down the eastern portion of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, to the west of which begin the Great Plains and wide-open spaces. The southern borders of Missouri and the Ohio River take on colorings of both Midwest and South. The eastern border of the Midwest can be regarded as the Allegheny mountains in Pennsylvania, so that Pittsburgh, for instance, seems midwestern while Philadelphia clearly does not. West Virginia serves as a similar three-toned border area between the Midwest, South, and East.

It is important to delineate such borders because a number of America’s best plays and playwrights have arisen from an intersection of regions. William Inge, one of the leading midwestern dramatists, hovers in Bus Stop and Picnic near the Kansas border of the West. Marsha Norman, born and raised in Louisville on the Ohio River, foregrounds a border sensibility in Getting Out and ‘night, Mother that combines midwestern and southern features in a way that Beth Henley’s plays, for instance, do not. Both George S. Kaufman and August Wilson arose out of Pittsburgh. Kaufman spent most of his later life in the New York orbit, but he continued to collaborate with midwestern authors, among them Edna Ferber and Ring Lardner. Wilson has set a series of plays in Pittsburgh and has lived and worked productively for years in Minneapolis-St. Paul while achieving his remarkable run of successes at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

How do plays of the Midwest, or from midwestern writers, differ from those written or set elsewhere? Generalizations are always treacherous, especially given the fluidity and restlessness of American culture; many midwestern dramatists who grow up and prosper in the country’s center, move later to the two coasts that particularly nourish theatre and film. Nonetheless, some regional markers are worth noting, if only as rough generalizations:

A number of these qualities overlap with those noticeable in other regions, but the Midwest generally lacks the overt sophistication of the Northeast, the self-dramatizing passion of the South, or the frontier detachment of the West.

The first midwestern playwrights were also leading figures in American realism, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) and Mark Twain (1835-1910). Born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, Howells went on to achieve success as a novelist and man of letters and mentor to many younger writers. Yet Howells also wrote a number of plays, many of them only now being reconsidered: “Their dialogue is infinitely superior to most stage dialogue of the time, and their scenes would appear to make for good theatre” (Bordman 358). Howells’ early plays, Out of the Question (1877) and A Counterfeit Presentment (1877), deal with struggles of a talented Midwesterner to find visibility and acceptance in the East.. His collaboration with Mark Twain, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist (1887), is a delightful assertion of midwestern values. Twain collaborated with Bret Harte on the unsuccessful Ah Sin (1877), but he created another major play in Is He Dead? (1898). Between them, Twain and Howells wrote the first significant plays from the region and asserted midwestern perspectives into the literary establishment that gained pre-eminence in the following century.

Particularly successful at the turn of the century were Augustus Thomas (1857-1934), born in Saint Louis, and George Ade (1866-1944), the “Aesop of Indiana.” Thomas strived to make his plays reflect American themes and is perhaps most remembered for his “state” plays—Alabama (1891), In Mizzoura (1893), and Arizona (1900)—as well as for popular comedies like The Earl of Pawtucket (1903) and Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots (1905). Ade first achieved theatrical fame with librettos for The Sultan of Sulu (1902) and Peggy from Paris (1903). His straight plays were also successful: The Country Chairman (1903), The College Widow (1904), set in the college town of Crawfordsville, Indiana, and to a lesser degree Just Out of College (1905) and Fathers and the Boys (1908). His later librettos added to his significant contribution in developing musical theatre in the U.S.

Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) of Indiana successfully adapted his novel Monsieur Beaucaire for theatrical performance (1901) and subsequently collaborated with fellow Midwesterners Harry Leon Wilson (The Man from Home, 1908, Cameo Kirby, 1909, and Tweedles, 1923), Otis Skinner (Mister Antonio, 1916), and Julian Street (The Country Cousin, 1917). According to Arthur Hobson Quinn, Tarkington is “best in drama when he gives rein to [his] fancy, abandons [the] effort to deal with ordinary conditions, and frankly takes his characters and situations into another time and place where he is freed from the limitations of accuracy” (Qtd. Bordman 655). The Trysting Place was given a successful reading in May 2001 at the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Conference at Michigan State University.

Perhaps the most striking development in the first decades of the twentieth century was the emergence of prominent women playwrights from the Midwest

William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910), also born in Indiana, taught English at the University of Chicago and showed great promise with two masterpieces, The Great Divide (1906) and The Faith Healer (1909), before he died at a tragically early age. The Great Divide, featuring a visit by Easterner Ruth Jordan and her fiancé and brother to the West, dramatizes a conflict between East and West, while The Faith Healer is set in the Midwest and can be regarded as the first important drama set in Middle America and embodying its ethos and values. Moody was a poet of considerable talent: “His early death is believed by many scholars to have deprived the theatre of a major voice to have left it for Eugene O’Neill to bring American drama to maturity a decade later” (Bordman 484).

Perhaps the most striking development in the first decades of the twentieth century was the emergence of prominent women playwrights from the Midwest, among them Zona Gale (1874-1938), Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), Rachel Crothers (1878-1958), and Zoë Akins (1886-1958). Catherine Waugh McCulloch (1862-1945) of Illinois, who served as Justice of the Peace in Evanston, wrote a striking suffragist play, Bridget’s Sisters; or, The Legal Status of Illinois Women in 1868, published in 1911, which was given a successful performance as recently as 1990. Zona Gale of Wisconsin won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded a woman for Miss Lulu Bett in 1921. Zoë Akins, born in Humansville, Missouri, became famous for her “society plays” like Déclassé (1919) and The Greeks Had a Word for It (1930) and won a Pulitzer Prize for her dramatization of Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid in 1935.

The astonishing Broadway career of Crothers, born in Bloomington, Illinois, spanned more than thirty years, from The Three of Us in 1906 to Susan and God in 1937. Her focus and style changed with the social climate of the times, but she continued to explore the subtleties of male-female relations. She was also the first woman to direct and produce plays on Broadway. He and She (1920) is particularly successful in dramatizing gender tensions. Expressing Willie (1924) pits unpretentious midwestern values against the idle rich of Long Island. As Husbands Go (1931), set in Dubuque, Iowa, is her most thoroughly midwestern play, and one of her best.

Glaspell, another important feminist playwright, grew up in Iowa, attended Drake University, and went on to become associated with Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown Players. Author of a number of probing long and short plays set in the Midwest, she became particularly successful with Suppressed Desires (1914), a spoof on psychoanalysis, Trifles (1916), and Alison’s House, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Trifles, a beautifully nuanced investigation of murder with sharply divided gender perceptions, evokes both midwestern rootedness in the land and outlaw violence of the West. Alison’s House offers a richly textured, midwestern adaptation of the life and legacy of Emily Dickinson.

Eugene Walter of Cleveland (1874-1941) began establishing himself as a noteworthy figure by writing social melodramas. Paid in Full (1908) and The Easiest Way (1909) were followed by a number of other theatrical works. Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959), born in Pennsylvania and most known for his historic poetic dramas like Mary of Scotland, Valley Forge, and High Tor, attended the University of North Dakota. His only play to come directly out of that experience, White Desert (1923), evokes the harsh realities of that trying landscape in winter. Donald Marquis (1879-1937), known primarily as a humorous columnist and born in Illinois, wrote several plays, including The Old Soak (1921), probably his most successful stage work, and Master of the Revels (1934), a comedy set in Tudor times. Both these writers are better known for other achievements but bear the stamp of their connection to the Midwest.

Langston Hughes (1902-67), first major African-American dramatist, was born in Joplin, Missouri and lived in Lawrence, Kansas before attending junior high in Illinois and high school in Ohio. He went on to become one of America’s important poets and a leading figure of the sparkling Harlem Renaissance. He is also a playwright of some significance, particularly Mulatto (1935), which ran at the Vanderbilt Theatre for 373 performances. In the mid-1930's, he wrote a series of plays for Russell and Rowena Jellifee’s Gilpin Players at Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio which dramatize his midwestern background. He shifted focus in 1938 to New York, and thereafter most of his plays specifying particular locales were set in Harlem. Hughes paved the way for arguably the greatest group of African-American playwrights from any region: Charles Gordone, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and August Wilson, among others.

American theatre of the 1920s and ‘30s featured a great deal of collaboration, much of it centered on George S. Kaufman (1889-1961), who grew up in Pittsburgh. Kaufman collaborated productively with Marc Connelly, whom he met in Pittsburgh, on a series of plays, including Merton of the Movies (1922), set in the “tiny Illinois town of Simsbury,” and Beggar on Horseback (1924). He worked with novelist Edna Ferber (1887-1968) on a variety of plays, including Dinner at Eight (1932) and Stage Door (1936). With Ring Lardner (1885-1933), a humorist like Ferber from Michigan, Kaufman created June Moon, s musical, in 1929. Lardner wrote a number of short dramatic pieces in his own right, including The Tridget of Greva (1922) and Abend di Anni Nouveau (1928), a four-page play in five acts. Lewis Beach (1891-1947), born in Saginaw, Michigan, achieved some success with The Clod (1916) and especially The Goose Hangs High (1924). F. Scott Fitzgerald's satiric The Vegetable, or From President to Postman, was performed in 1923.

One of the most important midwestern plays of the 1920s, The Front Page (1928), was written by Ben Hecht (1894-1964) and Charles MacArthur (1895-1956) and has subsequently been made into at least three films. Hecht was born in New York but raised in Wisconsin, and both he and MacArthur worked as newspapermen in Chicago. The Front Page takes place in the press room of Chicago’s Criminal Court Building, providing the prototype for a number of subsequent plays. The two playwrights also collaborated on Twentieth Century (1932) and other dramatic works. Another significant Illinois play, Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), was written by non-Midwesterner Robert Sherwood (1896-1955). This historical drama is still performed on a not infrequent basis at sites in Indiana and Illinois with particular relevance to the sixteenth president.

The 1930s also saw the rise of Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), one of America’s premier novelists and playwrights, who was born in Madison, Wisconsin and later had strong ties to Chicago. Our Town (1938), the most frequently performed American play, is set in the fictitious town of Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, but evokes a midwestern feel in many respects, with echoes of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and especially Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Pullman Car Hiawatha (1930), one of his path-breaking one-acts, begins in New York and arrives by train in Chicago a half hour later, with particular focus on the people and landscape of Ohio. Another one-act, The Long Christmas Dinner (1930), telescopes time from ninety years down to thirty minutes of a traditional American family ritual. Several later plays are also set in the Midwest. Wilder remains one of the most performed and best loved of playwrights, in part because of his seemingly rooted “middle-Americanness.”

Also active in the 1930s was Paul Osborn (1901-1988), born in Evanston, Illinois, whose play The Vinegar Tree opened in 1930. Morning’s at Seven (1939), winner of a Tony Award, is still performed with some regularity. James Thurber (1894-1961) is known primarily as a humorist, with strong ties to his native Columbus, Ohio. His one successful venture into theatre, The Male Animal (1940), was co-written with Elliot Nugent and proved quite successful. Action centers on a midwestern college town, where the characters must deal with assaults on academic freedom and all-too-familiar questions of shared governance. Along with Kaufman’s Merton at the Movies, The Male Animal remains one of the most successful midwestern comedies of this period.

Although musical theatre from the Midwest dates from Augustin Daly's adaptation of Twain's Roughing It (1872-3) and Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz (1903), the World War II years witnessed a boom in film musicals set there: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), directed by Vincent Minelli and again with Judy Garland, and State Fair (1945), set in Iowa. St. Louis Woman (1946), adapted from Arna Bontemps' novel God Sends Sunday by the author and Countee Cullen, features African-American experience and music by Johnny Mercer performed by Pearl Bailey and others. These and other midwestern musicals like The Music Man (1957), based on Meredith Willson's upbringing in Iowa, continue to be performed, filmed, and updated.

In the 1940s, three major playwrights—Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and William Inge—began to establish themselves, all with significant midwestern ties. Williams (1911-1983) has always been thought of as a southern playwright, and many of successful plays are set in that region. However, he spent twenty formative years in the Midwest and studying playwriting at both the University of Missouri in Columbia and the University of Iowa. Williams wrote over a dozen plays set in the region, including Hello from Bertha, The Strangest Kind of Romance, and The Long Goodbye. Hot Milk at Three in the Morning and The Magic Tower (1936), both one-acts, won prizes, and several full-length plays, Candles to the Sun, The Fugitive Kind (1937), and Stairs to the Roof (1941), were performed by The Mummers, a theatre group based at Washington University with which Williams was actively involved. The most famous of Williams’ midwestern plays, The Glass Menagerie (1945), based on the earlier Gentleman Caller, evokes the working-class feel of industrial St. Louis, along with the city’s fascination with glamor and decay. He returned to the same area for his late play, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979), which deals with many of the same themes as The Glass Menagerie, only this time the central character decides to remain in the Midwest and assume responsibility for her incapacitated sister.

The midwesternness of Williams’ apprentice years has not been sufficiently studied, and neither has Arthur Miller’s important stay in the Midwest as a student. Born in 1915 of Jewish parentage in New York, Miller spent a productive period at the University of Michigan, where he won the Avery Hopwood Award for Playwriting. Both The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), successfully revived at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2001, and particularly All My Sons (1947) are significant midwestern plays. The influence of the heartland wanes in Death of a Salesman (1949) and disappears later, once Miller became reintegrated into the Northeast. The small-town rootedness of All My Sons, with its scenes in the familiar backyard, gave way to the non-realistic elements of After the Fall (1964) and openly Jewish concerns of The Price (1968).

William Inge (1913-1973) is considered by many the “Dean” of midwestern playwrights, based on his four Broadway hits, Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), all of which were later successfully filmed. But Inge was more complicated than the moniker suggests. Both Picnic and Bus Stop are poised on the doorstep of the West, with the rootless traveler in search of escape to virgin territory and the

collection of disparate souls in a state of transition, a theme which appears also in the roadhouse of Glory in the Flower (1959). Dark at the Top of the Stairs, set in Oklahoma, is based largely on Inge’s upbringing in nearby Independence, Kansas. After Inge became successful and moved to New York, his later plays, with the exception of the Oscar-winning screenplay for Splendor in the Grass (1961), a popular film starring Natalie Wood, were not successful. Where’s Daddy? (1966), set in Manhattan, shows Inge in an uncharacteristically comic vein. Regional legend still attributes Inge’s suicide in 1973 to being divorced from his midwestern roots.

Another particularly successful play of the 1950s was Inherit the Wind (1955), written by Jerome Lawrence (b. 1915) and Robert E. Lee (b. 1918), two Ohioans. Based on the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925 in Tennessee, the script is nonetheless set in “a small country town somewhere in the South or Middle West.” This broadens the play’s import beyond a specific time and place. More contemporary conflicts in Kansas and elsewhere, where creationists and proponents of the teaching of evolution have squared off as recently as 2000, have kept the issues of this play relevant.

The 1950s saw the emergence of a whole generation of talent, who began emerging in the following two decades. Particularly important among these, from a social as well as a cultural standpoint, were African-American artists such as Lorraine Hansberry, Charles Gordone, Mari Evans, Adrienne Kennedy, and August Wilson. Hansberry (1930-1965), who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, became the first black woman to have a play on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun (1959). This play, set in Chicago, has since become an American classic in its depiction of African-American family life. Hansberry’s later plays, like The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Windows (1964) and Les Blancs were less successful but have been generating renewed interest. She died at a tragically early age.

Charles Gordone (1925-1995), born in Cleveland and raised in Elkhart, Indiana, became the first African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama for No Place for Somebody in 1970. Mari Evans (b. 1923), also born in Ohio (Toledo) and long associated with Indiana, is better known as a poet of such works as I Am a Black Woman (1964). But she wrote several plays in the 1970s, including Eyes (1979), an adaptation of Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Are Watching God. A stronger and broader legacy has been created by Adrienne Kennedy, who was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, grew up in Cleveland, and attended Ohio State University. From Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) through more recent works like The Ohio State Murders (1992) and beyond, Kennedy has established herself as a poet of the theatre, whose demanding, experimental works create their own aesthetic space.

August Wilson, born (1945) and raised in Pittsburgh in the midwestern fringe of western Pennsylvania, has become one of America’s leading playwrights. Major works date from his association with the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, where he wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), set in Chicago, and Fences (1987) and Piano Lesson (1990), both winners of the Pulitzer Prize, among other plays. His searing theatrical examination of African-American life in different historical decades often plays out against the backdrop of the Great Migration and cultural intersections of North and South.

Another group of Midwesterners of the same generation was energized by anti-establishment ethos of the Vietnam War era. Megan Terry, born in New York in 1932, has been called “the mother of American feminist drama” (Qtd. in Meserve 379). She created the first rock musical, Viet Rock, in 1966 at the Open Theatre but subsequently left New York in favor of Omaha, where she founded the Omaha Magic Theatre and has since gone on to write over sixty plays in her adopted home. Maryat Lee (1923-1989), born and raised in the Cincinnati area, worked for a while in New York, but became disillusioned with the elitist and commercial trends she saw dominating contemporary theatre and moved to West Virginia, where she established what she called “EcoTheater.” This approach relies on amateur players and dramatizes oral histories, aiming at authenticity in the context of a specific local community. Jack Gelber, born in Chicago in 1932, attended the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He is known chiefly for The Connection (1959), an aleatory, counter-culture play featuring streetwise drug-addicts that shocked and energized Broadway in the decade following. Later plays like Square in the Eye (1965) and Rehearsal (1976) continued in the experimental, improvisatory vein.

David Rabe (b. 1940) emerged with explosive energy with his Vietnam Trilogy in the early 1970s. Both The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones opened in to great acclaim in 1971. Born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa, with its Catholic ambience along the mighty Mississippi, Rabe has been marked by a confluence of guilt and flux, which dominates most of his work. His Vietnam trilogy features an “eager and wide-eyed” Midwesterner confronting a disorienting world. Stick and Bones, second play of the Vietnam Trilogy, seems particularly midwestern in its focus on Ozzie and Harriet, “typical” American parents, and their failure to understand the trauma experienced in Viet Nam by their eldest son, David.

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by David Radavich

Sam Shepard (b. 1943), another major playwright of the same generation, was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois but spent his later youth in California. Because of such works as Fool for Love (1979) and True West (1980), he is largely thought of as a western playwright. However, Chicago (1966) and other early plays are set in the Midwest, and Buried Child (1978) is quintessentially midwestern. When the son returns from roaming in the desert regions of the Southwest, the family farm is still rooted in the seasons of harvest, in elements of sun and rain, which ultimately feed and sustain, leading to potential renewal.

Another Vietnam veteran, Lanford Wilson (b. 1937), has written an important series of plays set in the Midwest. Born in Lebanon, Missouri, Wilson achieved success with this trilogy of plays set in his native Missouri: 5th of July (1978), Talley’s Folly (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Talley and Son (1985). All three plays focus on family, landscape, and continuity, though 5th of July also features an influx of guests from California and a settled gay couple at the center of the action. Among earlier plays, The Rimers of Eldritch (1965) ridicules small-town bigotries, and cultural tension between Nebraska and California motivates Lemon Sky (1969). The Mound Builders (1975) involves anthropology and the Native American legacy that undergirds contemporary American life in the Mississippi Valley. Wilson’s subsequent plays, like Burn This (1987) and Redwood Curtain (1992), have continued the earlier success, but in New York and California respectively.

One of the tragic losses in American was the untimely death of Larry Shue. Born in New Orleans in 1946, he studied at Illinois Wesleyan University and worked very successfully at the Milwaukee Repertory theatre. His early one-act, Grandma Duck Is Dead (1968), is set in a central Illinois college town. The Nerd (1984), his first major hit, seems distinctly midwestern, while his other great comedy, The Foreigner (1985), is set in Georgia. These two comedies rank among America’s finest; the loss from his premature death is incalculable.

Another major figure from the center of the country is David Mamet, born in Flossmoor, Illinois in 1947 and nurtured in the exciting theatrical scene in Chicago in the 1960s and ‘70s. Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1976) established Mamet as a fresh new voice and was later televised. The Duck Variations (1976) and other one-acts are set either in Chicago or in midwestern resort areas (e.g., Lakeboat (1981)). The most important work of this phase is American Buffalo (1977), one of Mamet’s best plays and a classic of the American theatre. In Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Mamet seems to have moved beyond the Midwest, and Speed-the-Plow (1989) is set in Hollywood. Like Rabe and Lanford Wilson, Mamet arose from the Midwest and has since broadened his perspective to other areas of the country.

The newer generation of playwrights includes a number of energetic artists whose future remains still in formation. Emily Mann (b. 1952), from Chicago originally and now long associated with the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, has written on a variety of documentary topics, including the southern Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, based on the narratives of two daughters of a man born in slavery. Still Life, based on interviews with three people in Minnesota in the summer of 1978, examines violence in America. Ntozake Shange (b. 1948) was born in Trenton, New Jersey and cannot be considered a midwestern playwright. Nonetheless, she spent crucial years at an integrated school in St. Louis from the age of 8 to 13, an experience she credits with educating her about the painful realities of racism in America. Many younger playwrights flourish now in cities like Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Detroit. David Auburn's Proof won the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize in 2001. The Midwest continues to generate genuine theatrical talent which feeds into mainstream American culture.

Sensibilities of the nation’s heartland are less well known and understood than those prevailing elsewhere. But a strong case can be made for the centering presence of the Midwest in American culture, even in drama, a genre that might seem antithetical to the regional attachment to understatement and rootedness. To an important degree, the central conflicts of the Midwest—surviving on the land, staying or going, fitting in or not fitting in—mirror the fundamental American struggle to sustain a viable new culture. The wide range of significant playwrights the heartland has produced give ample testimony to the vitality of its culture and its centrality to American habits of thinking and self-definition.

Bordman, Gerald Martin. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. New York: Oxford U P, 1992.

Meserve, Walter J. An Outline History of American Drama. New York: Feedback Theatrebooks & Prospero Press, 1994.

Stryk, Lucien. Heartland: Poets of the Midwest. De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois U P, 1967.