Mary Coyle Chase was the fourth woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama after the establishment of the award in 1918. She is perhaps best known for her play Harvey (1944), which won the 1944-1945 Pulitzer (over such contenders as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, 1944) and became one of the ten longest-running shows in Broadway history. Although Chase had a total of six plays that appeared on Broadway from 1937 to 1961, as well as eight plays that were produced at both the regional and university levels, none of her other works came close to rivaling the success of Harvey. This singular triumph may be one reason why her work has received such limited critical attention.

Like many dramatists writing in the aftermath of World War II, Chase used her work in order to "champion the necessity of dreams, and the powerful life of the human imagination," as scholar Albert Wertheim...