Layer II
The who, what, and why behind the curtain.
Playwright
1888–1953 · Nobel Prize 1936 · four Pulitzers
Often called the father of modern American drama. Moved American theatre from melodrama toward psychological realism and expressionism. Key works: The Emperor Jones (1920), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Iceman Cometh (1946), Long Day's Journey into Night (written 1941–42, produced 1956).
Playwright
1911–1983 · Pulitzers 1948, 1955
Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi. Lyrical, memory-haunted plays of outsiders and fragile dreamers in a harsh South. Key works: The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).
Playwright
1915–2005 · Pulitzer 1949
Moral and social dramatist of responsibility, guilt, and the cost of success. Testified before HUAC in 1956 and refused to name names. Key works: All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge (1955).
Playwright
1930–1965 · NY Drama Critics' Circle Award 1959
First Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. Her family's own fight against restrictive covenants reached the Supreme Court (Hansberry v. Lee, 1940). Key works: A Raisin in the Sun (1959), The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964), To Be Young, Gifted and Black (posthumous).
Playwright
1945–2005 · Pulitzers 1987, 1990
Created the Pittsburgh (Century) Cycle — ten plays, one per decade of the 20th century, nine set in the Hill District. Key works: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1985), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), The Piano Lesson (1987).
Play
O'Neill · set 1912
Autobiographical tragedy of the Tyrone family over a single day: a miserly actor father, a morphine-addicted mother, an alcoholic older son, and a consumptive younger son.
Play
Williams · 1947
Blanche DuBois, a faded Southern belle, collides with her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski in New Orleans. The old aristocratic South meets postwar working-class America.
Play
Miller · 1949
The final 24 hours of Willy Loman, an aging salesman whose faith in the success myth unravels. Memory scenes bleed into the present through an expressionistic structure.
Play
Hansberry · 1959
The Younger family debates how to spend a life insurance check. Mama's purchase of a house in white Clybourne Park forces a confrontation with housing segregation.
Play
Wilson · 1985 · set 1957
Troy Maxson, a garbage collector and former Negro Leagues star, struggles with his son's dreams, his marriage, and his own bitterness over a world that shut him out.
Term
Coined popularly by James Truslow Adams, 1931
The national myth that hard work brings upward mobility, home ownership, and freedom. Each playwright in this unit tests who is allowed to have it and what it costs.
Term
Style
Drama focused on characters' inner lives — desire, guilt, memory — staged within believable domestic settings.
Term
Williams, Production Notes to The Glass Menagerie
Williams' call for a theatre using light, music, and non-realistic devices to express inner truth beyond photographic realism.
Term
Miller, 1949 essay
Miller's argument that ordinary people are as apt subjects for tragedy as kings, when they risk everything to secure their sense of dignity.
Context
1929–1960
Economic collapse followed by suburban prosperity reshaped the dream — and sharpened the gap between those included and excluded.
Context
1930s–1968
Policies that denied Black families mortgages and homes in white neighborhoods — the real-world backdrop of A Raisin in the Sun.
Context
Late 1940s–1950s
The anti-communist hearings that inspired Miller's The Crucible as an allegory of mass hysteria.
Context
c. 1910–1970
Six million Black Southerners moved north and west — the movement underlying much of Wilson's Century Cycle and Hansberry's Chicago.