The 50-year period from 1880 to 1929 is the richest era for theater in American history, certainly in the great number of plays produced and artists who contributed significantly, but also in the centrality of theater in the lives of Americans. As the impact of European modernism began to gradually seep into American theater during the 1880s and quite importantly in the 1890s, more traditional forms of theater gave way to futurism, symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism. American playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, George Kelly, Elmer Rice, Philip Barry, and George S. Kaufman ushered in the Golden Age of American drama. The A to Z of American Theater: Modernism focuses on legitimate drama, both as influenced by European modernism and as impacted by the popular entertainment that also enlivened the era. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced entries on plays; music; playwrights; great performers like Maude Adams, Otis Skinner, Julia Marlowe, and E.H. Sothern; producers like David Belasco, Daniel Frohman, and Florenz Ziegfeld; critics; architects; designers; and costumes.

Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings covers the history of theater as well as the literature of America from 1538 to 1880. The years covered by this volume features the rise of the popular stage in American during the colonial era and the first century of the United States of America, with an emphasis on its practitioners, including such figures as Lewis Hallam, David Douglass, Mercy Otis Warren, Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, Joseph Jefferson, Ida Aldridge, Dion Boucicault, Edwin Booth, and many others. The Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings covers the history of early American Theatre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, producers, genres, notable plays and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the early American Theater.

Vol. 1. A-F, Vol. 2. G-O, Vol. 3. P-Z modern period.

The forty years 1880 to 1920 marked the golden age of the American theatre as a national institution, a time when actors moved from being players outside the boundaries of respectable society to being significant figures in the social landscape. As the only book that provides an overview of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatre, Actors and American Culture is also the only study of the legitimate stage that overtly attempts to connect actors and their work to the wider aspects of American life.