Great American Playwrights
Playwright↕ | Years↕ | Signature Play↕ | Pulitzer Prizes↕ | Known For↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Eugene O'Neill | 1888-1953 | Long Day's Journey Into Night | 4 | Only American playwright to win Nobel Prize in Literature (1936), autobiographical tragedy |
Tennessee Williams | 1911-1983 | A Streetcar Named Desire | 2 | Southern Gothic lyricism, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, tortured characters |
Arthur Miller | 1915-2005 | Death of a Salesman | 1 | The Crucible as McCarthyism allegory, married Marilyn Monroe, moral seriousness |
August Wilson | 1945-2005 | Fences | 2 | Pittsburgh/Century Cycle — 10 plays, one per decade of Black American life in the 20th century |
Edward Albee | 1928-2016 | Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? | 3 | Absurdism, Zoo Story debut, A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Women, contentious marriage plays |
Thornton Wilder | 1897-1975 | Our Town | 3 | Our Town's bare stage, The Skin of Our Teeth, also won Pulitzer for fiction (Bridge of San Luis Rey) |
Lorraine Hansberry | 1930-1965 | A Raisin in the Sun | 0 | First Black woman to have play on Broadway, youngest American to win Drama Critics Circle Award |
David Mamet | 1947- | Glengarry Glen Ross | 1 | Profane rapid-fire dialogue (Mamet-speak), American Buffalo, Oleanna, screenplays |
Sam Shepard | 1943-2017 | Buried Child | 1 | True West, Fool for Love, Curse of the Starving Class, also actor, American family dysfunction |
Tony Kushner | 1956- | Angels in America | 1 | Angels two-part epic on AIDS in Reagan era, Lincoln and Munich screenplays |
Neil Simon | 1927-2018 | The Odd Couple | 1 | Broadway comedy king, Brighton Beach Memoirs trilogy, Barefoot in the Park, Lost in Yonkers |
Lanford Wilson | 1937-2011 | Talley's Folly | 1 | Circle Rep co-founder, Hot l Baltimore, Fifth of July, lyrical Americana |
Paula Vogel | 1951- | How I Learned to Drive | 1 | Indecent, Baltimore Waltz, Brown and Yale playwriting teacher to generation |
Suzan-Lori Parks | 1963- | Topdog/Underdog | 1 | First Black woman to win Pulitzer for Drama, 365 Days/365 Plays project |
Lynn Nottage | 1964- | Sweat | 2 | Only woman to win two Pulitzers for Drama (Ruined and Sweat), MFA Columbia, documentary roots |
David Henry Hwang | 1957- | M. Butterfly | 0 | First Asian American to win Tony for Best Play, Chinglish, Yellow Face, librettist |
Horton Foote | 1916-2009 | The Young Man from Atlanta | 1 | Orphans Home Cycle (9 plays), To Kill a Mockingbird screenplay, Texas-set Americana |
Beth Henley | 1952- | Crimes of the Heart | 1 | Southern Gothic comedies, Mississippi sisters, youngest woman to win Pulitzer for Drama at the time |
Stephen Adly Guirgis | 1965- | Between Riverside and Crazy | 1 | LAByrinth Theater, Jesus Hopped the A Train, streetwise NYC voice |
Annie Baker | 1981- | The Flick | 1 | Naturalistic pauses, Circle Mirror Transformation, Shirley VT plays, hyper-real dialogue |
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