Maxwell Anderson

• 1. Introduction

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  Maxwell Anderson died on the 28th of February 1959, two days after a stroke, and was cremated. Half his ashes were scattered by the sea near his home in Stamford, Connecticut. The other half was buried in Anderson Cemetery near the small Pennsylvania town where he was born. His tombstone carries lines he wrote himself, about children of dust astray among the stars. It is an ending that suits a man who spent his entire adult life being fired from jobs he believed in, loving people who broke him, and writing plays that outlasted both.

  Who was Maxwell Anderson, and how did a Baptist minister's son from rural Pennsylvania become one of the most produced playwrights of the American twentieth century? How did a man fired so many times for speaking his mind find the discipline to write dozens of plays, many of them in blank verse? And what drove him to write, again and again, about characters caught between conscience and catastrophe?

• 2. A Childhood of Movement

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  Anderson was born on the 15th of December 1888 in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, the second of eight children. His father, William Lincoln Anderson, was a Baptist minister of Scotch-Irish descent who moved his family constantly to follow his ministerial posts. The family passed through Andover, Ohio; Richmond Center, Ohio; Townville, Pennsylvania; Edinboro, Pennsylvania; McKeesport, Pennsylvania; New Brighton, Pennsylvania; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and finally Jamestown, North Dakota, where Anderson graduated from high school in 1908.

  Being frequently ill as a child kept Anderson out of school for stretches of time. He spent those stretches reading voraciously. His parents and his Aunt Emma were all storytellers, and that household habit of narrative shaped something lasting in him. At eleven, during a visit to his grandmother's farm in Atlantic, he met Hallie Loomis, a slightly older girl from a wealthier family, and she became the first love of his life.

  The autobiographical tale he later wrote about that farm, Morning, Winter and Night, dealt with rape, incest, and sadomasochism. He published it under the pseudonym John Nairne Michealson to protect his family from the shock of recognition.

• 3. Fired, Repeatedly

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  Anderson obtained a bachelor's degree in English Literature from the University of North Dakota in 1911. He married Margaret Haskett, a classmate, on the 1st of August 1911 in Bottineau, North Dakota, and they had three sons: Quentin, Alan, and Terence.

  His early career reads like a catalogue of principled self-destruction. As principal of a high school in Minnewaukan, North Dakota, he was fired in 1913 for making pacifist statements to students. He completed a master's degree at Stanford in 1914, became a high school English teacher in San Francisco, and eventually rose to chair the English department at Whittier College in 1917. He was fired after a year for publicly supporting Arthur Camp, a student who had been jailed while seeking conscientious objector status.

  He then moved to Palo Alto to write for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, but was fired for arguing in print that Germany could not pay its war debt. The San Francisco Chronicle hired him next; a bout of Spanish flu cost him that job too. Alvin S. Johnson brought him to New York City to write about politics for The New Republic in 1918, and he was fired after an argument with editor-in-chief Herbert David Croly. He found steadier ground at The New York Globe and the New York World, and in 1921 he founded The Measure: A Journal of Poetry, a magazine devoted entirely to verse.

• 4. The Stage and the Blank Verse

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  Anderson's first play, White Desert, ran only twelve performances in 1923. But Laurence Stallings of the New York World reviewed it generously, and Stallings became his collaborator on the next project. What Price Glory?, produced successfully in New York City in 1924, was a World War I comedy-drama that drew protests from censors for its profanity. The chief censor, Rear Admiral Charles Peshall Plunkett, was discredited when investigators found he had written far more obscene letters to a General Chamberlaine. Anderson resigned from the World afterward and committed himself fully to the stage.

  He became one of the few modern American playwrights to write extensively in blank verse. Elizabeth the Queen opened in 1930 with Lynn Fontanne as Elizabeth I and Alfred Lunt as Lord Essex. Mary of Scotland, directed by John Ford in 1936, starred Katharine Hepburn as Mary, Queen of Scots, Fredric March as the Earl of Bothwell, and Florence Eldridge as Elizabeth; the original stage production had starred Helen Hayes. Anne of the Thousand Days, about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, opened on Broadway in 1948 with Rex Harrison and Joyce Redman, and reached the screen twenty-one years later with Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold.

  The Wingless Victory, also written in verse, premiered in 1936 with Katharine Cornell in the lead role and received mixed notices. Anderson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for Both Your Houses, a political drama, and received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award twice, for Winterset and for High Tor.

• 5. Kurt Weill and the Musicals

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  Anderson wrote the book and lyrics for two musicals with the composer Kurt Weill. Knickerbocker Holiday, set among the early Dutch settlers of New York, featured Walter Huston as Peter Stuyvesant. Its standout number, "September Song", became a widely performed popular standard.

  The collaboration's second result, Lost in the Stars, drew from Alan Paton's novel Cry, The Beloved Country, and its setting was South Africa. The title song also became a standard. In 1950, Anderson and Weill began work on a musical adaptation of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, but Weill died before the project advanced far; only a few songs had been completed.

  Anderson's 1927 comedy-drama Saturday's Children, about married life, ran long and launched an unexpected legacy of adaptations. The play was filmed three times, in 1929 as a part-talkie, in 1935 under the title Maybe It's Love, and in 1940 under its original title with John Garfield in one of his few romantic comedies. Humphrey Bogart made an early screen appearance in a television adaptation of the play, which was also condensed for television in 1950, 1952, and 1962.

• 6. Personal Turbulence

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  Around 1930, Anderson began a relationship with Gertrude Higger, a married actress who performed under the stage name Mab Anthony and the married name Mab Maynard. The affair ended his marriage to Margaret Haskett, who died in 1931 following a car accident and stroke. Mab divorced her husband, singer Charles V. Maynard, and moved in with Anderson. Their daughter Hesper was born in August 1934.

  Anderson's 1929 play Gypsy, written during this period, centered on a vain and neurotic woman who cheats on her husband and then kills herself by inhaling gas after he discovers the affair. The parallels to what followed in real life are hard to ignore. Anderson eventually left Mab after discovering her affair with his friend, television producer Jerry Stagg. On the 21st of March 1953, after several prior attempts, Mab killed herself by breathing car exhaust.

  Anderson's daughter Hesper later wrote a book titled South Mountain Road: A Daughter's Journey of Discovery, in which she revealed that following her mother's suicide, she discovered her parents had never actually married. Anderson married Gilda Hazard on the 6th of June 1954. That marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one, and lasted until his death five years later.

• 7. Hollywood, Hitchcock, and The Bad Seed

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  Anderson's adaptation of Joan of Lorraine became the 1948 film Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, with a screenplay credited to Anderson and Andrew Solt. When Bergman and her director altered much of his dialogue in order to make Joan seem, in his words, "a plaster saint", Anderson called her "a big, dumb, goddamn Swede." His relationship with the film industry was often contentious, but it was also enduring.

  He adapted All Quiet on the Western Front for the screen in 1930 and wrote the screenplay for Death Takes a Holiday in 1934, the latter based on a play originally written in Italian by Alberto Casella and translated by Walter Ferris. Alfred Hitchcock hired Anderson to write the screenplay for The Wrong Man in 1957, and then contracted with him to write the script for what became Vertigo in 1958. Hitchcock rejected Anderson's screenplay, which had been titled Darkling, I Listen.

  Anderson's final major Broadway success was The Bad Seed in 1954, adapted from the novel by William March. The play about a murderous child would be filmed in 1956 and again for television in 1985. For all his range, the Hitchcock commissions place Anderson in distinguished company at the very end of a career that had started with a twelve-performance failure in 1923.

• 8. The Archive and the Legacy

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  The largest collection of Anderson's papers now sits at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Anderson's widow, Gilda Hazard Anderson, placed the materials there in 1961. The collection spans over sixty boxes and includes published and unpublished manuscripts for plays, poems, and essays, as well as more than two thousand letters, diaries, financial records, nearly fifteen hundred family photographs, and personal memorabilia, along with one hundred sixty books from his personal library.

  Smaller collections are held at the Chester Fritz Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1954, the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Anderson its gold medal in Drama. Columbia University gave him an honorary doctorate in 1946, and the University of North Dakota followed with its own honorary degree in 1958, the year before he died.

  Anderson received honorary degrees from two of the institutions he had attended or worked near, which is a quiet kind of recognition for a man whose career began with a series of firings. The tombstone inscription he composed for himself asks what there is in darkness or light worth claiming a singing breath, save the brief history of a life islanded in death. Valley Forge, his play about George Washington's winter with the Continental Army, was adapted for television on three separate occasions, in 1950, 1951, and 1975, suggesting his work found new audiences long after his ashes were divided between the sea and the Pennsylvania earth.