A country-house comedy that turns, in its second act, into an unsparing indictment of the double standard that punished the woman and promoted the man.
Drama
Plays, read as books — the era's writers working in a form built for a room full of people.
Almost every writer on these shelves tried the stage at least once, and most of them were better novelists than playwrights. The attraction is easy to understand. A play pays differently, it reaches an audience in one evening rather than one reader at a time, and it forces a writer who has spent years on interior monologue to put everything into what people say out loud.
That constraint is what makes these texts worth reading rather than only watching. A novelist's play shows the machinery: the scene has to carry its own exposition, the silences have to be written as stage directions, and the compression the modernists prized on the page becomes literal, because an audience cannot turn back.
Two on our shelves. Hemingway wrote only one play, The Fifth Column, in October and November 1937, mostly in his room at the Hotel Florida in Madrid while the building took shellfire. Its hero, Philip Rawlings, passes as a war correspondent and is in fact running counter-espionage for the Republic. Love Goes to Press, which Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles wrote as a lark in 1946, is a farce about two women war reporters outmanoeuvring the men around them. Both were written by people who had just been in the war they set the play inside, and both are funnier and stranger than their authors' reputations suggest.
A note on dates. Plays are staged before they are published, and sometimes long before. Where the two differ, the record's publication year is the year the text appeared as a book, with the production history in the notes.
Authors to Explore
The drama we recommend
A political comedy about blackmail, a fortune built on a secret, and the damage caused by demanding moral perfection from another person.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1959 collection of five ballet scenarios — witches, sirens, gods and dockworkers, all speaking through movement rather than music.
James Baldwin's play about the murder of a young Black man in a Southern town and the all-white jury that lets his killer go, written after Emmett Till and dedicated to Medgar Evers.
An emperor turns the discovery that people die unhappy into a program of unlimited logical cruelty.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 play in five acts — Doctor Bardamu moves through colonial Africa, New York, the League of Nations and the Paris suburbs, everywhere finding institutions absorbed by hierarchy, money and paperwork instead of the people they claim to serve.
A society comedy in which a young wife suspects her husband, an excluded woman returns, and a fan becomes evidence that tells the wrong story.
Two war correspondents wrote a farce about two war correspondents. A hit in London in 1946, it closed on Broadway after four performances.
The Malcolm X film Columbia Pictures hired James Baldwin to write and never made. He published the screenplay as a book instead.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's early play — a bourgeois drawing-room comedy that slides through infidelity, a Paris house of assignation and Heaven, where God turns a telescope on the earthly spectacle.
Oscar Wilde's one-act tragedy, written in French, in which Salome demands the head of the prophet Jokanaan after he rejects her.
James Baldwin's first play: a woman pastors a Harlem storefront church, and then the husband she has told the congregation nothing about walks in.
An early five-act blank-verse tragedy in which a young man seeking revenge in Renaissance Italy falls in love with the wife of the ruler he plans to kill.
One volume, whole arsenal: every story through 1938 — 'Snows,' 'Macomber' — plus the Madrid play written under actual shellfire.
Oscar Wilde's best-known comedy: two men invent useful false identities, two women insist on marrying someone named Ernest, and a handbag resolves the plot.
Revolutionaries planning an assassination discover that a just cause does not settle what they may do.
Oscar Wilde's first play, a Russian political melodrama about a revolutionary torn between a planned assassination and love for the future ruler.
Beauvoir's only completed play, written under the Occupation and staged in Paris in October 1945 — a besieged fourteenth-century Flanders town choosing which of its own people it will not feed.
The screenplay published three years before the film existed, in a small edition Bukowski illustrated himself.
The revised script with photographs from the set — and 140 copies signed by Bukowski, Mickey Rourke, Faye Dunaway and the director.
Miller’s only play sends a heartless American through seven absurd, slapstick scenes toward mortality, love, and reluctant feeling.
The verse play whose opening night was a fist fight, and whose first scandal was a sentence that ran over the end of a line.
A Brooklyn longshoreman, two cousins off the boat from Italy, and a lawyer who stands at the side of the stage telling you how it ends before it happens.
A back yard, a broken apple tree, and a manufacturer who shipped cracked cylinder heads to the Air Force and let his partner go to prison for it.
One set, one house, and a travelling salesman whose memories walk into the kitchen while the present is still going on.
Arthur Miller read the 1692 Salem court records, changed four things in them, and wrote the play that a congressional committee later made him answer for.
A Southern schoolteacher with nothing left moves into her sister's two rooms in New Orleans, and her sister's husband sets out to prove she is lying.
A rich family gathers for the patriarch's birthday on a Mississippi plantation, and nobody will tell the truth: not about his illness, not about the money, and not about why his favourite son drinks.
A handsome drifter drives a fading film star back to the Gulf Coast town he left, hoping she will make him famous and win him back the girl he loved. The town has been waiting for him.
Zelda Fitzgerald's novel, play, eleven stories, twelve magazine pieces and a selection of her letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in one volume.
A son remembers the St. Louis flat he escaped: his mother's stories of her girlhood suitors, his shy sister's glass animals, and the one evening a young man came to dinner.
A clergyman thrown out of his church leads a coach party of schoolteachers to a run-down hotel on the Mexican coast, and falls apart over one stormy night.
Other styles on the shelf
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