Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays

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This 1920 anthology edited by Frank Shay and Pierre Loving collects fifty short plays from American and international writers of the early modernist era, offering a cross-section of the one-act form at its peak of influence. Contributors include Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Lord Dunsany, Zona Gale, Alfred Kreymborg, and others central to the little theater movement that transformed American drama in the 1910s. The collection functions as both an anthology of individual plays and a document of a theatrical moment when the one-act form was being reinvented as a vehicle for serious literary ambition.