John Howard Lawson is better known as one of the Hollywood Ten screenwriters blacklisted in the 1950s for alleged ties to the Communist Party than as a playwright or screenwriter. Critical discussions of his works have most often focused on his politics. Lawson's best plays, however, are not just vehicles for Marxist views. They blend political analysis with dramatic innovation. Plays such as Processional (1925), Loudspeaker (1927), Success Story (1932), and Marching Song (1937) dramatize the ills of everyday life and suggest, rather than demand, leftist solutions for them. By combining dramatic techniques and ideas from German expressionism, Russian constructivism, American jazz, psychological realism, and Hollywood script writing, Lawson created new forms of dramatic expression.

Lawson was born to wealthy Jewish American parents in New York City on 25 September 1894. His father, Simeon Levy Lawson, had changed the family name from Levy to Lawson before John Howard Lawson was born. As Lawson wrote...