In the 1930s few living American playwrights were better known than Robert Emmet Sherwood. Offstage, when he served as an adviser to the president of the United States, and onstage, through productions such as The Road to Rome (1927), Reunion in Vienna (1931), The Petrified Forest (1935), Idiot's Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), and There Shall Be No Night (1940), his humanitarian ideals vitalized the American conscience during the period between the two world wars. Sherwood is best remembered for undergoing a philosophical conversion that turned the pacifist liberalism of his early works into the strident militarism of his later works. But, Sherwood's protagonists are seldom liberals or militants; they are, like the playwright himself, romantics--individualists in conflict with the rigidity of Coolidge "prosperity." His plays are concerned with the themes of war and romance. Sherwood believed that the American writer "is afraid that if he leaps upward on a flight of...