SOURCE: Speranza, Tony. “Renegotiating the Frontier of American Manhood: Maxwell Anderson's High Tor.” American Drama 5, no. 1 (fall 1995): 16-35.

In the following essay, Speranza explores Anderson's depiction of changing ideals of American manhood in High Tor.

“In these new times,” asks Lise, Maxwell Anderson's spectral ingenue in High Tor, “are all men shadow? / All men lost” (58)? Coming during the waning years of the Great Depression, these questions about the substance and location of American men resonated beyond the walls of the Martin Beck theatre. In January 1937, Anderson teamed with director Guthrie McClintic to bring together on stage frontiers past and present in an attempt to locate within the fractured corporate and industrial economy of the twentieth-century a substantive ideal of American manhood. Anderson used frontier imagery and revised American folklore to provide American men with a past and future that made sense amidst a depression.

Unlike Washington Irving's hero...