A Reader’s Guide to Modern American Drama

Paper $19.95s   |   ISBN 0-8156-2939-7   |   2002

A comprehensive record of the achievement of the major American dramatists, and a complete history of American theater.

Reviews
"After a brief section titled ’Backgrounds,’ Sternlicht then tackles 11 subjects including the 19th-century dramatic inheritance, modernism, drama in academia, the federal theater, feminist drama, gay and lesbian drama, and African American drama. A following section on plays and playwrights (about 70) focuses on the famous (Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odetts, Neil Simon, Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner) and the less famous (Elliot Nugent, Marc Connelly, William Gibson, Herb Gardner, George C. Wolfe). Sternlicht’s economical and friction-free prose enables effortless reading."
— BookNews

"A must for all introductory drama courses."
— American Reference Books Annual

Description
A comprehensive survey of modern American drama beginning with its antecedents in Victorian melodrama through to the present. Sternlicht discusses the work and achievement of more than seventy playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to Susan-lori Parks—from the golden era of Broadway to the rise of Off-Broadway and regional theater. He shows how world theater influenced the American stage, and how the views of American dramatists reflected the great American social movements of their times. In addition, Sternlicht describes the contributions of the early Experimental theater, the Federal Theater of the 1930s, African American, feminist, and gay and lesbian drama—and the joyous trends and triumphs of American musical theater.

Author
Sanford Sternlicht teaches dramatic literature and theory in the Department of English at Syracuse University. He is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Modern Irish Drama and A Reader’s Guide to Modern British Drama.

6 x 9, 224 pages, bibliography