In the following essay excerpt, Krutch explores the two levels on which The Petrified Forest works—a familiar, popular level and one of a deeper symbolism.

Reunion in Vienna may not be intrinsically very important or even, in view of its close approach to the spirit of mid-European comedy, very original. With some show of reason one might, however, hail it as marking an epoch in the history of one of those minor folk ambitions which are seldom recorded even in histories of culture. From their earliest days the Washington Square Players were wistfully anxious to be, among other things, "continental," and the American intellectual often exiled himself in Europe for no better reason than that American authors were incapable of treating a chronicle of light love lightly. Here at last Mr. Sherwood had succeeded completely where others had failed; he was as "continental" as though...