When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever."

Portrays life in Grover's Corner, New Hampshire, in the early 1900's through the routine daily events and the major moments in the lives of George Gibbs, Emily Webb, and their families; and how their lives, although mundane, are touched by the universal forces of love, despair, apathy, nature, and death.

This Pulitzer Prize-winner is a deeply touching and funny play about three eccentric sisters from a small Southern town rocked by scandal when Babe, the youngest, shoots her husband. Humor and pathos abound as the sisters unite with an intense young lawyer to save Babe from a murder charge, and overcome their familys painful past. The scene is Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where the three Magrath sisters have gathered to await news of the family patriarch,...

No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.

Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great...

In this annotated version of Shakespeare's play, the author offers guidance with vocabulary, the usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. The on-page annotations provide readers with tools needed to comprehend the play and to explore its many possible interpretations. The author also offers background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the...

Although one of his lesser-known one-act plays, "The Hairy Ape," written in 1922, followed the success of his first two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. This drama follows the disturbing dehumanization of Yank, a ship's fireman and a representation of the lower class. He feels superiority from his brute strength until he meets Mildred, the well-intentioned daughter of an extremely wealthy steel magnate. She initiates Yank's uncertainty and disillusionment...

As an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband, and a father, Harry Potter struggles with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs while his youngest son, Albus, finds the weight of the family legacy difficult to bear.

A three-act drama about political corruption in early—twentieth century New York. First published in 1912, Upton Sinclair's “The Machine” tells the story of political grafting in New York City. The corrupt politicians of the Tammany Hall syndicate are using their business connections for their own financial gain, while some of the city's most vulnerable are drawn into a human trafficking ring. But a journalist, a lawyer, and an activist are...