Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright who wrote 37 plays and was associated with over 30 films. He won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. Anderson was a pacifist and was fired from teaching jobs for promoting his beliefs. He became a staff reporter and founded a poetry magazine before writing his first play, White Desert. His best-known play is Both Your Houses, a political satire about corruption in the US Legislature. Anderson also wrote numerous screenplays, including for Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man.
Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright, best known for his play Both Your Houses. Born in 1888 in Pennsylvania, over the course of his 69 years he wrote 37 plays and was associated with more than 30 films. He has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards.
In his early life, Maxwell Anderson adopted many of the pacifist ideals of Quakers in Pennsylvania. He received a BA in English in 1911 from the University of North Dakota, and continued to teach English, even managing the high school where he taught. He was fired just two years after he took the job to promote pacifism among his students. He then earned an MA in English from Stanford University, and returned to teaching, first at the high school level, then at Whittier College. He was fired again in 1918 for supporting a student pursuing conscientious objector status.
The path of teaching was once again closed to him, Maxwell Anderson continued to pursue English in other avenues. He became a staff reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and contributed to a number of newspapers, including the New York World and The New Republic. He then went on to found a poetry magazine, Measure.
Maxwell Anderson wrote his first play, White Desert, in 1923 at the age of 35. Although it was short-lived, he was well received and he quit his job as a reporter to fully pursue a career as a playwright. His next play, What Price Glory? it was also well received, though not a breakout success. During his career Anderson would go on to write many plays at this level, with respectable performances in respectable theatres, but little success with the public, besides a few successes.
Anderson’s best-known play is probably Both Your Houses, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. It is a biting political satire, which retains relevance to the modern political world some seventy-five years later. It’s about the Senate and House of Representatives in the United States, and the premise that the only way things get done in the Legislature is through kickbacks and corruption. The protagonist is a young congressman, who upon arriving in Washington discovers that a bill to fund a dam in his district, which would have done him well, was substantially overpriced due to the amount of graft attached to it. He spends the comedy fighting bill, even though he knows it will cost him all the political capital he might have.
Numerous screenplays were also written by Maxwell Anderson, including Saturday’s Children, which featured a young Humphrey Bogart in its first incarnation, and had five subsequent iterations. He also wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man in the 1950s. Although Maxwell Anderson stopped writing plays in the late 1950s, his work continued to be adapted to the screen well into the 1980s, and indeed the 1998 film Meet Joe Black credited him with writing a previous script that provided his inspiration.
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