The New Playwrights: Theatrical Insurgency in Pre-Depression America

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Malcolm Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
John Dos Passos ◽  
Nineteen Twenties ◽  
Commercial Company ◽  
Michael Gold ◽  
New Playwrights Theatre ◽  
John Howard

The New Playwrights' theatre, a non-commercial company founded by Michael Gold, Em Jo Basshe, John Howard Law-son, John Dos Passos, and Francis Edwards Faragoh, and supported by a series of grants from Otto H. Kahn, produced eight consecutive failures in twenty-four months of feverish activity at the close of the nineteen-twenties. Its works were among the most boisterous and futile ever witnessed in the smaller playhouses of New York, and its record of acid notices and early closings has not been broken in some thirty subsequent seasons of off-Broadway production.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Lisa Nanney
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
John Dos Passos ◽  
Lost Generation ◽  
Critical Transitions ◽  
John Howard ◽  
The U.S

In 1930, Time magazine’s cover proclaimed John Dos Passos the most important writer on the Left in the U.S., and classified him along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner as one of the most important of the “Lost Generation” writers for his innovative modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s. But by 1938 he had cut ties with leftist organizations in the U.S., begun publishing in anti-Communist journals, become estranged from leftist friends such as Hemingway and playwright John Howard Lawson, and was ostracized by leftist critics for expressing his conviction that Communism was the paramount threat to individual liberties and democracy. Thereafter, his books were often criticized as ideologically doctrinaire, their style as falling far short of his earlier achievements, which had adapted into dynamic narrative the visual devices of cinema. John Dos Passos and Cinema explores these political and critical transitions through the lens of the writer’s little-known work, much of it archival, in the medium of film itself. As a novelist, he had used film as a subject and stylistic source; as screen writer, he evolved his methods directly from the cinema’s visual language, demonstrating how potently the medium could be manipulated for political and commercial profit.

Enchanted Catastrophe

2021 ◽  
pp. 178-224
Author(s):  
Paul Haacke
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
John Dos Passos ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Fernand Leger ◽  
Critical Writings ◽  
French Texts

This chapter rethinks Le Corbusier’s idea of New York as an “enchanted catastrophe” by focusing on related concerns about architectural elevation and capitalist “creative destruction” in critical writings about the rise of the modernist American metropolis. In particular, it considers essays by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and novels by John Dos Passos as well as key French texts by Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel de Certeau, among others. In turn, it traces the post-World War II shift according to which Paris “lost its hegemony,” as Beauvoir put it, and New York appeared to replace it as the capital of the twentieth century.

Lawson, John Howard (1894–1977)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Chambers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Labor Dispute ◽  
John Howard ◽  
Theatre Guild

John Howard Lawson was born in New York City on September 25, 1894. His first major play, Roger Bloomer (1923), advanced expressionism in the United States, trading the pessimism that frequently defined the form for optimism. Processional (1925), produced by the Theatre Guild, was also formally adventurous. Combining jazz, vaudeville, and Dada, and focussing on a labor dispute, it is Lawson’s masterwork.

Three Industrial Towns by McKim, Mead & White

1979 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-347
Author(s):  
Leland M. Roth
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Extensive Study ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Niagara Falls ◽  
Industrial Buildings ◽  
Robber Baron ◽  
John Howard ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Town

Of the more than 940 commissions given to McKim, Mead & White, their industrial buildings (except for Pennsylvania Station) have been least studied. This is especially true of their industrial towns and the housing they designed for workers. In fact, few of the company towns started or expanded in the 19th century have received extensive study. McKim, Mead & White were engaged to design the first electrical generating station and then the housing for workers at Niagara Falls, New York, in 1891-1895; and at the same time they were asked to provide designs for mills and housing at Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. While both of these were new undertakings on open sites, the town of Naugatauk, Connecticut, where the firm had eleven commissions given them by John Howard Whittemore, was two centuries old when they started work in 1885. Their work here consisted largely of public buildings, and represents nearly the full range of tasks given turn-of-the-century architects. An examination of these industrial towns, of the context out of which they came, the expenditures they entailed, and the clients' motives modifies prevalent attitudes about the Robber Baron, and more fully defines the achievement of McKim, Mead & White.

Cooke Among the Yankee Doodles

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Don B. Wilmeth
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Will ◽  
John Howard

Late in the afternoon of 24 September 1812, Joseph Fay, a New York lawyer, was summoned to a well-known New York tavern called Mechanics' Hall to write the will of the actor George Frederick Cooke. In a letter to John Howard Payne written immediately after the event, Fay reflected on his unexpected experience.

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