Biography

Family

James Maxwell Anderson (December 15, 1888 – February 28, 1959) was an American playwright, author, poet, journalist and lyricist. Born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, he was the second of eight children of William Lincoln "Link" Anderson, a Baptist minister, and Charlotte Perrimela ('Premely') Stephenson, both of Scottish and Irish descent. His family initially lived on his maternal grandmother Sheperd's farm in Atlantic, then moved to Andover, Ohio, where his father became a railroad fireman while studying to become a minister. They moved often, following Lincoln’s ministerial posts. Maxwell was frequently ill, missing a great deal of school, and used his time in bed to read voraciously. Both his parents and Aunt Emma were storytellers, contributing to Anderson's love of literature.

The Andersons moved frequently, to Andover, Ohio, Richmond Center, Ohio, Townville, Pa., Edinboro, Pa., McKeesport, Pa., New Brighton, Pa., Harrisburg, Pa., to Jamestown, North Dakota in 1907, where Anderson attended Jamestown High School, graduating in 1908.

Journalism

As an undergraduate at the University of North Dakota, he was a waiter, worked at the night copy desk of the Grand Forks Herald, and participated in the school's literary and dramatic societies. He received a BA in English Literature from UND in 1911, and went on to become the principal of a high school in Minnewaukan, North Dakota, where he taught English.

He subsequently relocated to the Bay Area, and entered Stanford University, where he obtained an M.A. in English Literature in 1914. He went on to became a high school English teacher in San Francisco: after three years he was appointed chairman of the English department at Whittier College in 1917.

Anderson left Whittier and moved to Palo Alto to write for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. He relocated to San Francisco to write for the San Francisco Chronicle, then leaving the West Coast for New York City to write about politics for The New Republic in 1918.

Anderson found work at The New York Globe, and the New York World. In 1921, he founded The Measure: A Journal of Poetry, a magazine devoted to verse. He wrote his first play, White Desert, in 1923; it had only twelve performances, but was well-reviewed.

Dramatist

In 1924 Anderson dedicated himself full-time to a career as a dramatist following his first Broadway hit that year, the World War I comedy-drama,What Price Glory?, written with Laurence Stallings. His plays are in widely varying styles, and Anderson was one of the few modern playwrights to make extensive use of blank verse. Some of these were adapted to film, and Anderson wrote the screenplays of other authors' plays and novels, including All Quiet on the Western Front (1939) and Death Takes a Holiday (1934), in addition to books of poetry and essays. Anderson adapted his 1946 play Joan of Lorraine (starring Ingrid Bergman) to the screen as Joan of Arc (1948), based on a screenplay by Anderson and Andrew Solt.

Anderson enjoyed great commercial success with a series of plays set during the reign of the Tudor family, who ruled England, Wales and Ireland from 1485 until 1603. One play in particular – Anne of the Thousand Days – the story of Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn – was a hit on the stage in 1948, but did not reach movie screens for 21 years. It opened on Broadway starring Rex Harrison and Joyce Redman, and became a 1969 movie with Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold. Margaret Furse won an Oscar for the film's costume designs.

Another of his Tudor plays, Elizabeth the Queen, opened in 1930 with Lynn Fontanne as Elizabeth and Alfred Lunt as Lord Essex. It was later adapted to the screen as The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. Directed by John Ford, Mary of Scotland (1936) was an adaptation of his play of the same name involving Elizabeth I, starring Katharine Hepburn as Mary, Queen of Scots, Fredric March as the Earl of Bothwell, and Florence Eldridge as Elizabeth. The original play had been a hit on Broadway starring Helen Hayes in the title role.

His play The Wingless Victory was written in verse, and premiered in 1936 with Broadway actress Katharine Cornell in the lead role.

Adaptations and Awards

Anderson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his political drama Both Your Houses, and twice received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, for Winterset and High Tor.

He received the Gold Medal in Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954, an honorary doctor of literature degree from Columbia University in 1946, and an honorary doctor of humanities degree from the University of North Dakota in 1958.

Two of Anderson's historical plays, Valley Forge, about George Washington's winter there with the Continental Army, and Barefoot in Athens, concerning the trial of Socrates, were adapted for television. Valley Forge was adapted for television on three occasions – in 1950, 1951 and 1975. Anderson wrote book and lyrics for Knickerbocker Holiday, a 1938 musical about the early Dutch settlers of New York, featured Walter Huston as Peter Stuyvesant. The show's standout number, "September Song", became a popular standard, later recorded by dozens of artists from Nat King Cole to John Lennon. Another popular standard, “It Never Was You,” has been recorded by multiple performers including Judy Garland to Tony Bennett.

Another standard is the title song of Anderson and Weill's Lost in the Stars, based on the Alan Paton novel Cry, The Beloved Country which opened on Broadway in 1949. The title song was recorded by artists as varied as Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and Elvis Costello.

Anderson's long-running 1927 comedy-drama about married life, Saturday's Children, in which Humphrey Bogart made an early appearance, was filmed three times – in 1929 as a part-talkie, in 1935 as Maybe It's Love and once again in 1940 under its original title, starring John Garfield in one of his few romantic comedies, along with Anne Shirley and Claude Rains. The play was also adapted for television in three condensed versions in 1950, 1952 and 1962.

His last successful Broadway stage play was 1954's The Bad Seed, Anderson's adaption of the William March novel. He was hired by Alfred Hitchcock to write the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1957). Hitchcock also contracted with Anderson to write the screenplay for what became Vertigo (1958).

Advocacy

Many of Anderson’s plays and musicals commented on issues of the day directly or indirectly, and some were controversial. His 1923 play White Desert defended equality between the sexes. Winterset (premiering in 1935 at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway) was a thinly veiled rebuke of American political repression and the 1927 execution of Italian-born American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Anderson’s collaboration with Kurt Weill in the 1949 Broadway production of Lost in the Stars, an early and moving critique of apartheid in South Africa, has been described by historian Roni Mikel-Arielias as “a metaphor for the racial injustice of African American segregation in the US.” In a letter seeking to obtain author Alan Paton's permission to adapt his novel to the stage, Anderson wrote: "For years I've wanted to write something which would state the position and perhaps illuminate the tragedy of our own Negroes… Now that I've read your story I think you have said as much as can be said both for your country and ours."

Anderson bridled at government overreach in many of his writings, and earned criticism from left and right for views unpopular in their time, but often prescient. Among his more light-hearted songs questioning authority was the song “How can you tell an American?” in Knickerbocker Holiday.

Personal life

Anderson married Margaret Haskett, a classmate, on August 1, 1911 in Bottineau, North Dakota. They had three sons, Quentin, Alan, and Terence. He had one daughter, Hesper, by Gertrude “Mab” Maynard, in 1934. Mab took her own life in 1953. Anderson married Gilda Hazard in 1954, and adopted her children Craig and Laurel.

Death

Maxwell Anderson died at the age of 70 in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 28, 1959. He was cremated, and half of his ashes were scattered by the sea near his home in Stamford. The other half was buried in the Anderson Cemetery in Cochranton, Pennsylvania, 9 miles east of his birthplace, and about 85 miles north of Pittsburgh. The inscription on his tombstone reads:

Children of dust astray among the stars

Children of earth adrift upon the night

What is there in our darkness or our light

To linger in prose or claim a singing breath

Save the curt history of life isled in death

Archives

The largest collection of Maxwell Anderson's papers is preserved at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and includes published and unpublished manuscript materials for plays, poems, and essays, as well as over 2,000 letters, diaries, financial papers, nearly 1,500 family photographs, and personal memorabilia are preserved along with 160 books from the playwright’s library. Smaller collections of Anderson's papers can be found at institutions around the world including the University of North Dakota, Chester Fritz Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.