American playwright John Howard Lawson and the politics of the avant-garde: Modernist revolt, left-wing drama, and popular culture in the 1920s

The dominant critical narrative of John Howard Lawson's 1920s career is one of aesthetic decline. Lawson's early innovation earns a footnote in modern American theater history. However, critics ultimately blame “politics” for undermining his aesthetic promise, arguing that by his late 1920s work for the radical New Playwrights Theatre, Lawson was “half-way” to a debilitating 1930s Communist commitment. Even sympathetic studies examine Lawson in the “political drama” subcategory reserved for left-wing playwrights, or assert his aesthetic value “despite” his politics. Critics emphasize the European origins of Lawson's 1920s plays—expressionism, Marxism; in reading Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), and The International (1928), I make Lawson's use of modern American popular culture (jazz, tabloids, vaudeville, film) their defining feature, arguing for their interpretation as an American avant-garde current within the modernist revolt against pre-War elite culture, whose radical politics were populist and nationalist.; I critique Lawson's critical reception to reveal its underlying political and aesthetic assumptions, labeling the dominant approach “centrist” for its attempt to straddle a self-imposed divide between modernist high art and low popular culture. I argue that Lawson's drama challenges his critics' centrist framework that favors and unites the aesthetics of psychological realism and the politics of liberal humanism. Rather than confining his experiments with popular culture to an apolitical realm of art, I reveal the politics of Lawson's commitment to popular forms through an examination of his 1920s plays, manifestos, initial reception, and unpublished autobiography, focusing especially on Lawson's cultural nationalism.; My analysis of the critical debate over Lawson's drama reveals the contested origins of the new definitions of American dramatic art that emerged in the twenties. I reveal the partisan origins of the centrist standards that maintain a conceptual division between Lawson's formal experiment and radical politics. The 1920s radical press' support for Lawson's innovative drama challenges inaccurate stereotypes about the relationship between modernism and the Left. I conclude that this new understanding of Lawson's avant-garde drama offers new possibilities for analyzing Lawson's 1930s career and American theater criticism.