After the war a writer faced a new world. The changes in the form of play writing speak volumes of the change in our mode of thought and our standards. When I had written my first plays in the early nineties, asides were freely spoken. I had frequently written scenes in the old days in which the lovely heroine sat calmly in a chair, violently struggling to pretend not to hear the villain and his fellow conspirators who plotted her undoing in loud voices at a distance of six feet. The soliloquy was also in good usage, that marvelous aid to the clumsy craftsman by which all necessity for a carefully reticent exposition could be laughed aside. I used to start a play, for example, with a lady alone on the stage as the first curtain rose. She would perhaps turn sadly away from the window and looking the audience firmly in its composite eye would exclaim: “Poor John; I wonder if he knows that I have been untrue to him.” This naturally saved a lot of time and had a distinct advantage from the audience’s point of view. They had very little excuse for not knowing what the play was all about. Deeper, however, than any change in the shifting methods of play writing was the change in the point of view of our audiences. The “Prodigal Son” story, the “Cinderella” story, and the “Magdalen” story seemed to have lost their power; the old one about, “My son shall never marry a daughter of the Hoosis’s” no longer bit very deep, and the poor dramatist had to learn all over again. I can best explain the change that twenty years had brought by telling of an experience I had with a play called DRIFTWOOD. I wrote this play in 1905 and read it to a famous star of that time; the lady liked the part and urged her manager to produce the play, but after long reflection he decided against it on the grounds that the heroine of my play had made in her youth what the French writers so politely describe as “a slip,” and in his experience it was out of the question that any audience could ever be willing for her, no matter how deep her repentance, to marry a decent man. Twenty years after I dug this old faded manuscript out of a trunk and was struck by some scenes of what seemed to me to be of real power and truth, and again I took it to a great woman star, whose verdict was “It didn’t seem to her to be about anything worth making such a fuss about.” And she was as right in her opinion as the manager of the old days had been in his. After the production of THE DETOUR I attacked my work from a slightly different point of view, and my next job was the very pleasant one of making for my old friend, William A. Brady, the American adaptation of THE INSECT COMEDY, which was produced as THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. I followed this with ICEBOUND, which won for me the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and caused me to be selected as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.