Sherwood followed The Petrified Forest with Idiot's Delight, the first of his three Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. Published in 1936, it concerns a group of European travelers who are trapped in a hotel, coming to grips with their beliefs as World War II begins. In reality, the war began years after the play was written.

Of all of the famous criminals of the early thirties, the one Duke Mantee seems most closely patterned after is Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, who was accused of murdering federal agents in helping a prisoner to escape in an event called the "Kansas City Massacre" (like the "Oklahoma City Massacre" reported in the play). The facts of Floyd's life and mystique are examined in Michael Wallis's Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd (1992).

Edward Anderson's novel Thieves Like Us (1935) was a groundbreaking work about...