Both Your Houses (Author Biography)

Author Biography

From high school on, it was clear that Maxwell Anderson was destined to work with words. What was not yet clear was that he would end up being one of the most prolific and respected playwrights of his generation. He was born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, on December 15, 1888. Because his father was a Baptist preacher with no established congregation, the Anderson family moved frequently when Maxwell was young, and his education was often interrupted; still, he maintained a passion for reading and writing. He attended the University of North Dakota, graduating in 1911.

Anderson taught high school English in San Francisco for two years after graduating from college. During that time, a prestigious national magazine, the New Republic, published several of his poems, and Anderson earned a graduate degree from Stanford University, which helped him become the head of the English department at Whittier College in 1917. He only held that position for a little more than a year, however. His views against war made him unpopular at a time when the United States was fighting in World War I, and they cost him his job. The New Republic gave him a job on its editorial staff, and for years he supported himself writing for it and for several newspapers.

To make money, Anderson taught himself how to write dramas. His first play, the war drama What Price Glory? (1924), was a success. Co-written with World War I veteran Laurence Stallings, it ran for 299 performances and gave Anderson the financial security to quit journalism and devote his attention entirely to playwrighting. He went on to have thirty of his works produced, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Both Your Houses in 1933, and the New York Critics’ Circle Award for Winterset in 1935 and for High Tor in 1937. He is well remembered for his work in film, having written screenplays for such classics as Key Largo (1948), and the 1932 film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain, as well as lyrics for the popular Broadway song “September Song” and the musical Lost in the Stars.

As a playwright, Anderson is best remembered for the range of his style and the compassion of his worldview. He was able to satirize the complexity of American politics in Both Your Houses and to explore historical drama in plays about Queen Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn, and Mary, Queen of Scots. He adapted works by Lytton Strachey and Alan Paton for the stage. He was one of the few writers who could draw significant audiences to see plays written in verse as well as in the common language.

Anderson’s personal life was happy but uneven. He married his first wife, Margaret Haskett, in 1911. She died of a stroke in 1931. In 1933, he married his second wife, Gertrude Maynard; she committed suicide after twenty years of marriage, in 1953. He married Gilda Oakleaf in 1954, and she was with him until his 1959 death from a stroke in Stamford, Connecticut.