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The plays of the thirties were notoriously engagé, but they were also very often set at a great distance from the audience’s place and time, in Lincoln’s day or in that of Mary, Queen of Scots. They aspired, as literature does, to universal truths rather than to the kind of immediacy and familiarity that delighted the audience of The Front Page, not to mention Earl Carroll’s Vanities. Theater traditionally depends on topicality to forge a bond with the audience. And yet Thornton Wilder, a novelist whose subject was almost always “the human condition” rather than any particular transitory state of affairs, devised in Our Town a form of drama wholly removed from the particular. The village in which the play is set, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, has the generality of allegory; it could be—indeed, is—anywhere. Wilder even dispenses with incident itself, an act of daring and a conscious flirtation with tedium that few authors before Samuel Beckett even thought to attempt.

The stratum of life Wilder seeks lies below the busyness and turbulence of event. “This is the way we were,” says the Stage Manager, who narrates the comings and goings of Grover’s Corners: “In our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.” The prose itself aspires to a kind of stately, reverential quietude. Our Town has no wit, no politics, no “views.” The small-town folk talk endlessly about the weather and express themselves in the kind of earnest aphorisms that would have marked them as oafs in the sparkling drama of an earlier generation. The play’s faith in common wisdom is a rebuke to urbanity itself. But Wilder doesn’t mean the rebuke: Our Town wishes to recall us to our common humanity, and to remind us that death settles all differences and stills all vanity. And the wiseacres of Broadway, to their great credit, recognized Our Town for what it was. Jed Harris, who had produced and directed many of Broadway’s wittiest and most self-referential shows, directed the play with the softest of hands. And the work was hailed as “a gentle masterpiece” by that most prolix and noisy of critics, Alexander Woollcott.

Men like George M. Cohan and Stanley Walker and the columnist Jack Lait, who recoiled in horror before the new Broadway of dance halls and penny arcades, had been raised in, and in some cases had helped shape, the old Broadway of the lobster palace and the roof garden. But younger men could not share their nostalgia, or their horror. A. J. Liebling was born in 1904; the Times Square he knew as a rich kid growing up on Park Avenue was the Times Square of the speakeasy and of the fight crowd hanging out at Jacobs Beach. Liebling was an impudent and mischief-making character who loved the con artists and sidewalk mythologizers of Times Square. All forms of fabrication, so long as they were ingenious or at least preposterous, appealed to him; and as a young reporter on The World-Telegram, he returned again and again to the petty characters of Broadway. He covered Commissioner Geraghty’s 1932 hearing on burlesque and quoted Geraghty heartily defending Professor Heckler’s Flea Circus, the star attraction of Hubert’s Museum, whose license was also up for renewal. Billy Minsky sniffed, “I will not tell my girls that they have been compared with fleas. They would be much offended.” “Well,” one of the lawyers cracked, “at least the fleas wear clothes.”

Liebling yearned to write for the arch and saucy New Yorker; and in 1935, he got his wish. His already prodigious literary gifts were polished to a yet brighter sheen by contact with his fellow wags at The New Yorker, as well as by the opportunity to write at greater length and with greater leisure; but his subject matter, and his essential tone, changed not at all. Liebling wrote about the nobodies of Times Square, and especially about the nobodies in its northern reaches, which Damon Runyon had haunted the decade before. He wrote of Izzy Yereshevsky, the proprietor of the