Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...following autumn, Wolfe started Mannerhouse, a drama about the decay of old South. He wrote to a friend: "I think my play The House will `pack a punch,' for it is founded on a sincere belief in the essential inequality of things and people, in a sincere belief in men and masters, rather than in men and men, in the sincere belief in some form of human slavery--yes, I mean this...." Wolfe did not finish this play at Harvard. He finished it years later, just before he abandoned drama and started Look Homeward, Angel...
...Welcome to Our City, he described his ideas of "literary photography," the quality in his later writing which was to make critics throw up their hands in disgust, and prompt Bernard DeVoto to growl about the "proper business of fiction." Wolfe wrote to Baker: "I have written this play with thirty-odd named characters because it required it, not because I didn't know how to save paint. Some day I'm going to write a play with fifty, eighty, a hundred people--a whole town, a whole race, a whole epoch--for my soul's ease and comfort...
...production of Welcome to Our City was fairly successful. In the late spring of 1923 Wolfe was elated, and confident of commercial success. Baker had submitted the play to the Theater Guild, and Wolfe considered himself a buding dramatist: "I am a slave to the thing; my mind is filled with it night and day. I find I have become an evesdropper, I listen to every conversation I hear, I memorize every word I hear people say, in the way they say it. I find myself studying every move, every gesture, every expression, trying to see what it means dramatically...
...Wolfe decided that Harvard had done all it could for him. While waiting for the Theater Guild's decision on his play, Wolfe traveled to Asheville and then to New York City. His finances were running low and he hesitated to turn again to his mother for help...
...about the time when Leroy Anderson took over the conductorship of the Band, which was approximately 1930, he began to compose original arrangements, almost always in medley form, in order to give the band something more unique to play than the regulation marches and the rather stolid, staightforward settings of college songs which had been largely the fare of college bands up to that time. One of his greatest successes, of course, was "Wintergreen for President" which he based on the famous song from Gershwin's "Of Thee I Sing" which was published about 1930 or 31. Where the original...