Laurence Stallings
Laurence Tucker Stallings was an American playwright, journalist, and war veteran known for his poignant reflections on the experience of soldiers during World War I. Born in North Carolina in 1894, Stallings developed an early appreciation for music and literature, influenced by his mother. After earning his B.A. from Wake Forest University, he enlisted in the Marines during World War I, where he was severely wounded at the Battle of Belleau Wood, resulting in the amputation of one leg and later the other. His most renowned work, the play *What Price Glory?*, co-written with Maxwell Anderson, is notable for its realistic portrayal of war and its impact on individuals, blending humor with a critical view of war's futility.
Stallings's literary career thrived in the 1920s and 1930s, with successful adaptations like *The Big Parade* and *A Farewell to Arms*. Despite his early success, he struggled to replicate that achievement in later works outside the war theme. He transitioned into a career in film as a scriptwriter and served again in the military during World War II. Stallings's final work, *The Doughboys*, published in 1963, highlighted the military strategies of the American forces in France during the First World War. He passed away in 1968, leaving a legacy that emphasizes the trauma of war and the complexities faced by soldiers in times of conflict.
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Laurence Stallings
American playwright and screenwriter
- Born: November 25, 1894
- Birthplace: Macon, Georgia
- Died: February 28, 1968
- Place of death: Pacific Palisades, California
Biography
An important early influence on Laurence Tucker Stallings’s development was his mother, Aurora Brooks Stallings, who had a flair for music and literature. As a boy Stallings also developed a fascination for Civil War heroes. He earned his B.A. at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in 1916, and after a short stint as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, he enlisted in the Marines in 1917 after the United States entered World War I. In France he saw action on the last day of battle at Belleau Wood. In the course of a charge he was seriously wounded, an injury that led to the amputation of one leg in 1922. (In 1963 the other leg also had to be amputated). Following the war he earned an M.A. at Georgetown University in 1922, after which he worked as a reporter first for The Washington Times and then for The New York World, where playwright Maxwell Anderson was also employed; in 1931 he joined The New York Sun. During these years in New York, Stallings met many literary figures of the day at the legendary Algonquin Hotel.
Unquestionably Stallings’s first play, What Price Glory?, written in collaboration with Maxwell Anderson, became his most celebrated, even though he wrote only one of the three acts of this dramatic comedy. In this act, however, Stallings documents his response to his war experience. In the cellar of an embattled French town on the Western Front, two longtime friendly enemies, Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt, quarrel about the bloody business of war. Stallings mixes bawdy humor with a more subtle message about war’s futility. He also spiced up Anderson’s language with the kind of talk he had heard at the Front, profanities Broadway had not previously witnessed. With its language and its representation of men in the trenches, the play brought realism to the stage in an unprecedented manner.
The war continued to permeate both Stallings’s fiction and nonfiction, and that is where his strength lay. He was less successful when he attempted to write about other topics. Both First Flight, which tells the romantic adventures of a young President Andrew Jackson, and The Buccaneer, which is about a seventeenth century British adventurer, were failures and in fact brought about the end of Stallings’s collaboration with Maxwell Anderson. By contrast, The Big Parade, in which an officer wearily appreciates the brutal irony that in war some soldiers are chosen to live and some to die, was made into a successful film in 1925. The same is true of Stallings’s stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) in 1930. After What Price Glory?, however, Stallings’s career as a dramatist deteriorated, and as a novelist and short-story writer he remained essentially a single-topic author. He admitted: “Like a lot of writers, I had just one thing to say and I said it.”
In 1934 Stallings became editor of the Fox newsreel series Movietones. In that capacity he toured Ethiopia to film the Italian conquest of that country (1935-1936). In 1936 he was divorced from Helen Poteat, with whom he had had two daughters, and one year later he married Louise St. Leger Vance, with whom he had one son and one daughter. He moved to California and became a scriptwriter for various Hollywood film studios. During World War II he reenlisted in the U.S. Marines, was given a desk assignment in Washington, and finally retired as a lieutenant-colonel.
In 1963 Stallings’s expansion of an earlier essay titled “The War to End War” led to the publication of The Doughboys, which dealt with the military tactics and campaigns of the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. It was his last work.
Stallings died of a heart attack on February 28, 1968. His name will always be associated with the trauma and alienation suffered by individuals at war as well as with his biting portrayal of those fighting and dying in a world of political confusion and insanity, a world in which war is futile and incomprehensible.
Bibliography
Brittain, Joan T. Laurence Stallings. Boston: Twayne, 1975. A brief and simple treatment of Stallings’s life and work. Includes a selected bibliography.
Flexner, Eleanor. American Playwrights, 1918-1938: The Theatre Retreats from Reality. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. Provides a good philosophical critique of What Price Glory?
Krutch, Joseph Wood. The American Drama Since 1918: An Informal History. Rev. ed. New York: G. Braziller, 1957. Insightful in contrasting the romantic dash and vivid portrayal of emotions in What Price Glory? with the unexceptional qualities of First Flight and The Buccaneer, which both feature more routine kinds of cloak-and-dagger melodrama.