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KENNETH J BINDAS
Robert Sherwoodbest remembered for the plays Idiot's Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), and There Shall Be No Night (1940) and the political biography Rooseveltand Hopkins (1949). But one of his most insightful works examines the depression era and human reactions to it. The Petrified Forest, written in 1935, takes place in a small diner/gas station on the edge of the Arizona desert. Owned by Gramps Maple and operated by his granddaughter Gabrielle
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and his son Jason, a World War I veteran, the diner becomes home to a series of wanderers, including Boze, a former college football player; a writer named Alan Squire; Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm, travelers from Dayton, Ohio; and Duke Mantee and his gang of killers. In this 1930s-style diner on the edge of the petrified forest, illuminated by a neon B-B-Que sign, the drama of the characters' lives, their hopes, dreams, and realities, is made clear.1.
Sherwoodchooses this place, where the stumps of old trees, rather than decomposing as they should, have remained, to detail the complex and fundamental changes taking place during the depression. The petrified forest stands as a testament to days gone by, or as the principal character Alan Squire declares, ''the graveyard of the civilization that's been shot from under us. It's the world of outmoded ideas'' (Sherwood 133). In an early scene between the writer (Leslie Howard) and the naively optimistic Gabrielle (Bette Davis), Squire outlines the drama's philosophical underpinnings. He pontificates that he is from a bygone era, a relic of ''rugged individualism'' lost in a world that no longer has relevance for him or his ideas. He is confused and trapped: on one hand he wants to love and live; on the other, he knows that the only way for humanity to progress is for him to pass on. He tells Gabby--who insists that his intellectual credentials, Easterner, writer, European experience, ensure that he has something to give to society--that he has ''brains without purpose'' and recognizes...