Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War (review)

It might sound strange to hear someone say that Robert Emmet Sherwood was the most influential American playwright of the twentieth century. The author of The Petrified Forest and Abe Lincoln in Illinois is best remembered today as a toiler on the Great White Way, someone who wrote witty comedies and patriotic melodramas of the type that made up the popular fare between the wars. Harriet Alonso’s fascinating biography, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War, shines a critical light on that assessment, revealing a playwright who moved in the highest political circles, and one whose every play focused on the political and social issues of his day: first as a pacifist, then later as an interventionist. While his influence on the theatre could never match that of O’Neill or Williams, his influence in the political sphere, on foreign policy, and on the Roosevelt White House was considerably greater than any other theatre practitioner. Alonso, a historian of peace movements, now runs the Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York. Her book is a painstaking history, drawing material from Sherwood’s diaries and letters, his plays, essays, and reviews, and previous writings about him.

From the point of view of theatre or cultural studies, this book is invaluable. Sherwood was a fixture on Broadway from the 1920s through the 1950s. On stage and in film, newspapers, and magazines, as well as in speechwriting, he was one of the most prolific writers of both the Prohibition and Depression eras—and one of the most celebrated, as four Pulitzer prizes and an Oscar attest. He was one of the first film critics in America, a founding member of The Playwrights Company, and a founder of the Algonquin Round Table. His relationships with Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott (to name a few), and his long collaboration with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, make up the bulk of material in Alonso’s narrative.

The central question Alonso asks is: how did Sherwood go from being an avowed pacifist to an interventionist to a hawkish cold warrior? Sherwood wrote about this transformation in essays, journals, and letters, and it informed his screenplays and stage plays. Alonso uses all this material to shed light on Sherwood’s work and his theatrical career. A firsthand witness to trench warfare in World War I (he was wounded in a poison gas attack), Sherwood joined the antiwar movement. His pacifism informs all of his plays throughout the 1920s. But the rise of fascism prompted Sherwood to abandon pacifism and become a supporter of FDR, eventually joining the White House staff as a presidential speechwriter. When America entered World War II, Sherwood joined the war effort as a propagandist, eventually becoming director of the Foreign Information Service, where he founded the Voice of America. As a peace historian, Alonso is able to place Sherwood in the broader context of the pacifist movements of the 1920s and the conflicts created in those movements by fascism, which played themselves out in Sherwood’s writing.

Although she does not theorize Sherwood’s biography, Alonso’s critical voice is present, stemming mostly from her own pacifism. She does not shy from Sherwood’s racist or anti-Semitic statements. She shares Sherwood’s horror of war and his hatred of fascism, but she criticizes Sherwood for conflating fascism with socialism. At times, the book seems too speculative. She often tells us what Sherwood’s emotions were in a given situation, without clearly indicating whether this information comes from something he has written or her own interpretation. The sheer density of the material can take over at times, leading to some threads being dropped unexpectedly and others being confused.

Alonso divides the book into theatrically themed sections: “Act I,” “Interlude,” and “Act II.” This structure sounds pretentious, but in fact it organizes the material well for Alonso’s purpose. The subtitles of the chapters (“From Soldier...