Makers of the Modern Theater

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1961. Lt. green full cloth boards, green and blue cover and spine titles, moderate wear, rub. Pages fine. Bright blue endpapers. The modern theater does not fall neatly into categories. The best way to define it is to sample it. That is the kind of definition this book attempts. The range of this collection is the range of the modern theater entering the lattter half of the century, from Ibsen to the present, from the first playwrights to break with the extravagences of the romantic drama and the precisions of the well-made play to the nearly formless and antitheatrical plays of the contemporaneous period. Within the limitations of the available space, almost every kind of writer in the modern theater is represented. There are major ones: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann, Pirandello, Synge, O'Neill, O'Casey. Those not always recognized as major: Yeats, Toller, Marcel, Lorca, Montherlant. And there is another group of striking individuals who have made vital contributions: Anouilh, Betti, Williams, Miller, Ionesco. None is represented by a work that has been frequently anthologized. All can be seen here at their most provocative, contributing something new, experimental, and altogether theatrical to the theater, even when they are themselves most affronted by theatrical procedures and most in revolt against them. 743 pages.. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall. Book.