ANDERSON

Maxwell Anderson was born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, in 1890. He developed a love of literature and obtained a BA in English Lit from the University of North Dakota in 1911 and later an MA from Stanford in 1914. After a series of jobs in teaching and journalism, Anderson found his way to New York where he wrote his first play in 1923, White Desert. The play ran only 12 performances, but helped establish Anderson’s talent for prose.

Anderson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his political drama Both Your Houses, and twice received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, for Winterset, and High Tor.

Anderson wrote book and lyrics for two successful musicals with composer Kurt Weill. Knickerbocker Holiday, about the early Dutch settlers of New York, featured Walter Huston as Peter Stuyvesant. The show's standout number, "September Song", became a popular standard. So did the title song of Anderson and Weill's Lost in the Stars, a story of South Africa based on the Alan Paton novel Cry, The Beloved Country.

Honorary awards include the Gold Medal in Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954, an honorary doctor of literature degree from Columbia University in 1946, and an honorary doctor of humanities degree from the University of North Dakota in 1958.

Maxwell Anderson died in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 28, 1959.