Everything about Maxwell Anderson totally explained
James Maxwell Anderson (
15 December 1888 –
28 February 1959), better known as
Maxwell Anderson, was a
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, author, poet, reporter and lyricist, and a founding member of 'The Playwrights' Company' (which included, at various times, Anderson,
S. N. Behrman,
Elmer Rice,
Robert E. Sherwood,
Sidney Howard,
Roger L. Stevens,
John F. Wharton, and
Kurt Weill, and produced many notable plays of the
20th century).
His life
He was born in
Atlantic, Pennsylvania, the second child of William Lincoln Anderson, a
Baptist minister, and his wife, formerly Charlotte Perrimela Stephenson. His family initially lived on his maternal grandmother's farm in Atlantic, then moved to
Andover, Ohio, where his father became a railroad fireman while studying to become a minister. They moved to
Jamestown, North Dakota in 1907, where Anderson attended Jamestown High School, graduating in 1908.
As an undergraduate, he waited tables and worked at the night copy desk of the
Grand Forks Herald, and was active in the school's literary and dramatic societies. He obtained a
B.A. in English Literature from the
University of North Dakota in 1911. He became the principal of a high school in
Minnewaukan, North Dakota, also teaching English there, but he was fired from this job in 1913 because he'd made
pacifist statements to his students. He then entered
Stanford University, obtaining an
M.A. in English Literature in 1914. He became a high school English teacher in
San Francisco: after three years he became chairman of the English department at
Whittier College in 1917. He was fired after a year for public statements supporting a student seeking
conscientious objector status.
He next became a reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle and the
San Francisco Bulletin, then moved to
New York, where he wrote editorials for
The New Republic, the
New York Globe, and the
New York World.
In 1921, he founded
Measure, a magazine devoted to verse. He wrote his first play,
White Desert, in 1923, which ran only twelve performances, but was well-reviewed by the book reviewer for the
New York World,
Laurence Stallings, who collaborated with him on his next play
What Price Glory?, which was successfully produced in 1924 in
New York City. Afterwords he resigned from the
World, launching his career as a dramatist.
He wrote many well-known plays, of widely-varying styles, and was one of the few modern playwrights to make extensive use of
blank verse. Some of these became movies, and Anderson wrote screen adaptations of other authors' plays and novels —
Death Takes a Holiday,
All Quiet on the Western Front — as well as books of poetry and essays. The only one of his plays that he himself adapted to the screen was
Joan of Lorraine, which became the film
Joan of Arc (
1948) starring
Ingrid Bergman, with a screenplay by Anderson and
Andrew Solt. Anderson was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in
1933 for his political drama
Both Your Houses, and twice received the
New York Drama Critics Circle Award, for
Winterset, and
High Tor.
Anderson was, above all, a strong believer in the dignity of man (although
humanism might be too strong of a word), and many of his plays focus on the concepts of
liberty and
justice. Anderson can probably be credited with popularizing the use of poetry in modern drama. He chose to write in solitude, preferring to write
longhand in a wire-bound notebook, and refused to attend the
opening nights of his plays.
He enjoyed great commercial success with a series of plays set during the reign of the
Tudor family, who ruled
England,
Wales and
Ireland from
1485 until
1603. One play in particular -
Anne of the Thousand Days — the story of
Henry VIII's brutal marriage to
Anne Boleyn — was a hit on the stage in
1948, but didn't reach movie screens for twenty-one years, perhaps due to
censorship (there is much use of the word "bastards" in the play, and frank discussion of sexual relationships). It opened on Broadway starring
Rex Harrison and
Joyce Redman, and, in
1969 became an Oscar-winning movie with
Richard Burton and
Geneviève Bujold. (
Margaret Furse won for her costume designs, but in a year that the costume drama might have been seen as old-fashioned, that was the only Oscar out of several nominations that the film actually won.) The play is still occasionally performed today. Another of his Tudor plays,
Elizabeth the Queen, was adapted as
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (
1939), starring the legendary actress
Bette Davis and Hollywood pin-up,
Errol Flynn. Still another of his plays involving Elizabeth I,
Mary of Scotland (
1936), was turned into a film, albeit an unsuccessful one, in
1936, starring
Katharine Hepburn as
Mary, Queen of Scots,
Fredric March as the
Earl of Bothwell, and
Florence Eldridge as Elizabeth. The play had been a hit on
Broadway starring
Helen Hayes in the title role.
He married Margaret Haskett, a fellow classmate, on
1 August 1911 in
Bottineau, North Dakota. They had three sons,
Quentin, Alan, and Terence. Margaret died of cancer on
22 February 1931. Anderson then resided with Gertrude "Mab" Higger starting in about October
1933. A daughter, Hesper, was born
2 August,
1934. Gertrude ("Mab") committed suicide on
21 March 1953. Her daughter Hesper (who was screenwriter for the movie
Children of a Lesser God), wrote a book
South Mountain Road: A Daughter's Journey of Discovery about her unearthing, only after the suicide, the fact that her parents had never married. Maxwell Anderson did marry once more, to Gilda Hazard, on
6 June 1954.
Honorary awards include the Gold Medal in Drama from the
National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954, an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from
Columbia University in 1946, and an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from the
University of North Dakota in 1958.
Two of Anderson's other historical plays,
Valley Forge (about
George Washington's winter there with the
Continental Army), and
Barefoot in Athens, about the trial of
Socrates, were adapted for
television, but not for the
cinema. Indeed,
Valley Forge was adapted for television three times — in
1950,
1951, and
1975.
Anderson wrote book and lyrics for two successful musicals with composer
Kurt Weill.
Knickerbocker Holiday was about the early Dutch settlers of New York, with
Walter Huston as
Peter Stuyvesant. The show's standout number, "
September Song," became a popular standard. So did the title song of Anderson and Weill's
Lost In The Stars, a story of South Africa based on the
Alan Paton novel
Cry, The Beloved Country.
His popular long-running 1927 comedy-drama about married life,
Saturday's Children, in which
Humphrey Bogart made an early appearance, was filmed three times - in 1929 as a
part-talkie, in 1935 (in almost unrecognizable form) as a
B-film entitled
Maybe It's Love, and once again in 1940 under its original title, starring
John Garfield in one of his few romantic comedies, along with
Anne Shirley and
Claude Rains. The play was also adapted for television in three condensed versions, in 1950, 1952, and 1962.
Anderson also adapted the
William March novel
The Bad Seed into a play, one of his last to reach
Broadway. He was hired by
Alfred Hitchcock to write the screenplay for Hitchcock's
The Wrong Man (
1957). Hitchcock also contracted with Anderson to write the screenplay for what became
Vertigo (
1958) but Hitchcock rejected Anderson's screenplay which bore the title
Darkling I Listen.
Maxwell Anderson died in
Stamford, Connecticut, on
28 February 1959, two days after suffering a
stroke.
Plays and Musicals
Films
What Price Glory - 1926 - play
Saturday's Children - 1929 - play
Cock-Eyed World, The - 1929 - story
All Quiet on the Western Front - 1930 - adaptation & dialogue
The Guardsman - 1931 - one scene from Elizabeth the Queen is featured, just after the opening credits of the film
Rain - 1932 - adaptation
Washington Merry-Go-Round - 1932 - story
Death Takes a Holiday - 1934 (screenplay only; the play was written in Italian by Alberto Casella and translated into English by Walter Ferris)
We Live Again - 1934 - adaptation, from Tolstoy's Resurrection
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer - 1935 - uncredited contributing writer
Maybe It's Love - 1935 - play Saturday's Children
So Red the Rose - 1935 - screenplay
Mary of Scotland - 1936 - play
Winterset - 1936 - play
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex - 1939 - play Elizabeth the Queen
Saturday's Children - 1940 - play
Knickerbocker Holiday - 1944 - play
The Eve of St. Mark - 1944 - play
Winterset - 1945 - TV - play
A la sombra del puente - 1946 - play
Key Largo - 1948 - play (almost completely rewritten for the screen by John Huston and Richard Brooks)
Joan of Arc - 1948 - play Joan of Lorraine - screenplay
Pulitzer Prize Playhouse - 1950 TV Series - play - four episodes
Celanese Theatre - 1951 TV Series - play - two episodes
What Price Glory - 1952 - play
The Alcoa Hour - 1955 TV Series - play - episode "Key Largo"
The Bad Seed - 1956 - play
The Wrong Man - 1956 - novel The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero
Never Steal Anything Small - 1959 - play The Devil's Hornpipe
Ben-Hur - 1959 - uncredited
Barefoot in Athens - 1966 - TV - play
The Star Wagon - 1967 - TV - play
Elizabeth the Queen - 1968 - TV - play
Anne of the Thousand Days - 1969 - play
Valley Forge - 1975 - TV - play
Lost in the Stars - 1974 - play
The Bad Seed - 1985 - TV - play
Meet Joe Black (1998) (earlier screenplay) (inspiration)
Best-known Lyrics
(Worked with composers Kurt Weill and Arthur Schwartz)
"September Song" (from Knickerbocker Holiday), by far his most famous song lyric
"Lost in the Stars" (from Lost in the Stars)
"Cry, The Beloved Country" (from Lost in the Stars)
"When You're in Love"
"There's Nowhere to Go but Up"
"It Never Was You"
"Stay Well"
"Trouble Man" (from Lost in the Stars)
"Thousands of Miles"
Books
You Who Have Dreams - 1925 - poetry a book of poetry
The Essence of Tragedy and Other Footnotes and Papers - 1939 - essays
Off Broadway Essays About the Theatre - 1947 - essays
Notes on a Dream - 1972 - poetryFurther Information
Get more info on 'Maxwell Anderson'.
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