New York drama critic Burns Mantle began in 1920 to compile the annual anthology of excerpts from the 10 best plays of the season. Although the summaries of stage action interspersed by exemplary dialogue passages cannot substitute for reading the entire text of a play, the volumes are invaluable for their roundup of data on all the plays on Broadway. The series continued without interruption under the successive editorships of John Chapman,* Louis Kronenberger,* Henry Hewes,* Otis L. Guernsey, Jr.,* and Jeffrey Sweet.*
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.