The author of more than fifty plays, Martins Ziverts was the most popular and productive Latvian dramatist of his generation. A meticulous master of dramatic form and craftsmanship, he believed in the intrinsic values of time-honored rules, the foremost being the classical principle of striving for the greatest effect with a minimum of means. He was awarded the Latvian Culture Foundation Prize for Tireļpurvs (Tirelis Marsh) in 1936 and the Free World People's Prize for fostering Latvian drama in exile in 1968. He served as president of the Latvian PEN club from 1967 to 1987, and in 1990 he was elected an honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Since 1931, when Nafta (Naphtha), a speculative drama about discovering petroleum in Latvia, was first produced by the National Theater in Riga, his plays have been staged all over the world, wherever a Latvian theater exists, and have been translated into German...