Six Great Modern Plays

Six plays from literary masters that stand as landmarks of the modern drama, collected in one stunning volume

Here are six plays that have become masterpieces in their own right, from some of the most influential playwrights of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters repeats, in terms of a handful of people, the spasms of a dying society.
• Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder is the tragedy of the modern romantic, caught between desire and reality.
• George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession shocked England and America; this play was the first honest attempt in our era to deal with prostitution.
• Sean O’Casey’s Red Roses For Me is about a Protestant worker of Dublin who is a symbol of the ravaging conflicts in Ireland—and in man.
• Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie is a tender, despairing portrait of two women, one lost in the past, the other in herself.
• Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is a biting, though compassionate, indictment of success through moral betrayal.

At the time of the book’s original publication in 1956, the plays were still called “modern.” But they are high art, and are written with devotion to truth, and those two qualities have made them timeless.