Daniel Aaron's chapter on Dos Passos, footnote 10

10. Dos Passos, *NR*, LXVI (April 1, 1931), p. 175. John Howard Lawson, Mike Gold, Em Jo Basshe were his associates in the New Playwrights Theatre. Persuaded by Mike Gold, the philanthropist Otto Kahn donated $30,000 to finance the group ("dubbed the 'revolting playwrights' by Alexander Woollcott," according to Harold Clurman), and then proceeded to produce a half-dozen much-criticized plays. References to the group can be found in Clurman's "The Fervent Years" (N. Y., 1945) and in *NM*, III (Jan. 1928), p. 27, (March 1928), p. 23, (April 1928), p. 27. Dos Passos's remarks on the New Playwrights and his observations on the problems and possibilities of the revolutionary theater are stated in his introduction to his *Three Plays* (N. Y., 1934), pp. xi-xxu, and in *NM*, IV (Aug. 1929), p. 13, III (Dec. 1927), p. 20. By "revolutionary," he meant a theater that had broken with the current theatrical practices, not the theatrical tradition: "It must draw its life and ideas from the conscious sections of the industrial and white collar working classes which are out to get control of the great Tabby mass of capitalist society and mould it to their own purpose. In an ideal state it might be possible for a group to be alive and have no subversive political tendency. At present it is not possible." *NM*, III (Dec. 1927), p. 20. Dos Passos's highly jaundiced afterthoughts about his New Playwright friends and Lawson in particular are contained im his rather mediocre novel *Most Likely to Succeed* (N. Y., 1954).

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