The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity

Brenda Murphy is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night (2001), Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film and Television (1999), Miller: Death of a Salesman (1995), Tennessee WIlliams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (1992), and American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940 (1987), all published by Cambridge University Press. She has edited Understanding Death of a Salesman (with Susan Abbotson, 1999), The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights (1999), and A Realist in the American Theatre: Selected Drama Criticism of William Dean Howells (1992). She is the author of many articles and reviews on drama and American literature, which have appeared in such journals as Modern Drama, Theatre Journal and American Literature, and she has contributed chapters to many titles in the Cambridge Companions series.

• Preface; 1. The founding: myth and history; 2. The first plays; 3. Others and the other players; 4. Glaspell and O'Neill; 5. The legacy.

“An engaging study of the intersections and divergences of ideas about modernism as they were developed and played out on the stages, in the plays and in the group dynamics of the Provincetown Players.” -- Choice