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PREFA CE
forever and at will. Nobody can. Radio has to wait for the good thing.
I hope this book will do something toward removing from the darkness of anonymity a few names that have every right to be known. I hope it will also do something toward preserving written material that has every right to be preserved long after its last syllable has been pronounced by an actor. I should like to say here, too, that radio today is sufficiently flexible to take the work of the best workmen whenever they can find time to write for us. This means that the true craftsman can ignore the enervating insistence of dead lines; that he can work according to his own humor; that he can work in his own time. After all, it is the writer who matters most, for it is he who provides functions for all the others who make up a show. None can have existence without him. He alone creates; the rest are translators, interpreters, transmitters, imitators; surely something less than inventors. Most acting is a domestic science; little of it is creative. Acting can exist only after something else already living, and acting is important only in so far as it reveals the meaning in the material it activates. As all broadcasters know, to wait for good material is a chancy assignment, but even so, such attendance has had its gratifications, and I have set them down here as I have found them.
Waiting for the good thing has brought to the American radio audience much that is rich and beautiful, much that is exciting, and much that deserves equal rank with the best of present-day work in any field. Radio has delivered fine work by Wilbur Daniel Steele, Maxwell Anderson, Carl Sandburg, William Saroyan, Dorothy Parker, J. P. Marquand, Stephen Vincent Benet, William Rose Benet, Lord Dunsany, Albert Maltz, William March, Percival Wilde, Edwin Cranberry, Carl Carmer, Marc Connelly, T. S. Stribling, Paul Green, Zora Neal Hurston, DuBose Heyward, Hendrick Van Loon, Hamlin Garland, Robert Frost, Phil Stong, Ernest Hemingway, James Gould Cozzens, Hilaire Belloc, Eric Knight, Pare Lorentz, T. S. Eliot, Sutton Vane, Frank O’Connor, Richard Connell, Stanley Young, Mary Ellen Chase, Evelyn Waugh, and a
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