4 years ago

288

"For what avails the plow or sail or land or life if Freedom fail?"
The Free Company was a voluntary group of distinguished American playwrights, writers, actors and radio workers who join their talents to bring you this series with no compensation other than the knowledge that it may serve America.

The Free Company presented original radio plays written by its members Maxwell Anderson, Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Vincent Benet, James Boyd, George M. Cohan, Mark Connelly, Archibald Macleish, Orson Welles, Elmer Rice, William and Robert E. Sherwood - Nine of them Pulitzer Prize Winners.

William Saroyan was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, The Human Comedy.

Saroyan has been described in a Dickinson College news release as "one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century" and by Stephen Fry as "one of the most underrated writers of the [20th] century." Fry suggests that "he takes his place naturally alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner". Kurt Vonnegut has said that Saroyan was "the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists.

They called themselves The Free Company of Players. Principal Actors: Burgess Meredith, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Edmund Gwenn, Nancy Kelly, Tim Holt, Eduardo Cianelli, William Trach, Clinton Rosamon, Charles Bickford, Melvyn Douglas, Clair Trevor, Edward Ellis, Margaret Hamilton, Franchot Tone, Gail Patrick, Sidney Lumet, Myron McCormick, Alan Dineheart, Elia Kazan, Eric Burroughs, Harrington Lewis, Georgette Harvey, The Juanita Hall Singers, Harry Carey, William Davidson, Ray Collins, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloan, Paul Stewart, Erskine Sanford, Norman Corwin, Canada Lee, Luis Van Rooten, Paul Green, Edna Mae Harris, Marietta Kantie, Paul Muni, George M. Cohan, Paul Henreid, Eddie Ryan Jr., Lily Valenti, Betty Jane Tyler, Frances Chaney Writers: William Saroyan, Marc Connelly, Robert Sherwood, Stephen Vincent Benet, Walter Van Tilberg Clark, Orson Welles, Archibald MacLeish, Maxwell Anderson, Sherwood Anderson

Originally Broadcast 2/23/1941
Episode 1

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