Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War. By Harriet Hyman Alonso. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. 394 pp. Cloth, $98.00, ISBN 978-1-55849-618-7. Paper, $28.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-619-4.)
2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/27694481
ISSN1945-2314
Autores ResumoThis is a richly textured treatment of one of America's most honored yet long-forgotten playwrights, Robert E. Sherwood, who also helped provide a model of the public intellectual. Harriet Hyman Alonso, a professor of history at the City College of New York, explores the evolution of Sherwood's attitude toward peace and war during the period of global conflagrations in the first half of the twentieth century. In the process, Alonso presents the story—at least indirectly—of members of a generation that engaged in combat in Europe before experiencing postwar disillusionment. Many subsequently adopted an anti-interventionist stance that was cast aside only when the threat posed by right-wing aggressor states led to the conclusion that the United States must engage in collective security. Robert E. Sherwood is intended first and foremost as a biography of its remarkable subject. Possessing distinguished ancestral roots, Sherwood grew up as something of a callow youth little given to academic excellence, notwithstanding his attendance at Milton Academy and Harvard University. Sherwood made his mark at Harvard through involvement with organizations such as the Hasty Pudding Club and the Harvard Lampoon. Leaving Harvard before receiving his degree, Sherwood joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force, having been turned down by the U.S. Army because he carried only 167 pounds on a six-and-a-half-foot frame. Sherwood's exposure to trench warfare, poison gas, and shrapnel that tore into his body, helped alter his earlier romantic perception of the Great War. He adopted a pacifist stance, rooted in belief in the Sermon on the Mount, while beginning to make his mark in New York literary circles. Befriending Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, Sherwood participated in the Algonquin Round Table of New York writers and critics, wrote for Vanity Fair, and served as a film critic for Life magazine. He was particularly irked by those, such as the film czar Will Hays, who favored censorship. Sherwood worked on Hollywood screenplays, and he strove to offer an antiwar slant in the American theater. His plays appeared on Broadway; a number of them, such as The Petrified Forest (1935), were adapted for films. Three of Sherwood's plays—Idiot's Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), and There Shall Be No Night (1941)—dealt with the issue of war and peace and garnered Pulitzer prizes for drama.
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