“Mr. Linney continues to be one of our most perceptive chroniclers of the folkways of rural America, finding humanity and nobility in the most remote of places.” –Mel Gussow, New York Times “Linney’s words do it all, summoning up vistas of scary beauty and passions of elemental force.” –David Richards,Washington Post “His output was dazzling in its variety and exceptional for its depth as well as its breadth of scope. Goering at Nuremberg, Lord Byron’s daughter, the Washington novels of Henry Adams: Life, literature, and history were all his materials, not to be milled down into iconic emptiness, but to be explored for the values they might carry…One of America’s best playwrights.” –Michael Feingold, Village Voice Romulus Linney is one of American drama’s best-kept secrets. Uniquely adept at capturing the idiomatic poetry of his native South, he maneuvers with equal grace through the vernacular of New York’s contemporary intelligentsia and the voices of a wide range of historical figures. In Childe Byron, the dying daughter of the notorious Lord Byron conjures a confrontation with the father she never knew. In 2, Linney scrutinizes Hitler’s infamous second-in-command, Hermann Goering, behind the scenes at the Nuremberg trials. Tennessee celebrates the indomitability of early Appalachian mountain settlers, while Heathen Valley reveals the same region’s citizens’ subsequent search for faith. In FM, an authentic genius stumbles into the creative writing course of a small Alabama college. Set among SoHo literati, April Snow is a compassionate study of a world-weary screenwriter. Endowed with Linney’s lyric intensity, augmented by his rich sense of humor, the six plays in this volume illuminate a major talent of the American Theatre.

THE STORY: Set in the mountains of North Carolina in 1870, the play deals with a frontier family; father, mother and son, who work long hours to wrest a living from the small farm they have bought from the county. Unexpectedly an old woman appears, perhaps deranged, and carrying a cowbell and a broken bit of mirror. They offer her food and drink, and she talks of her youth-which was apparently spent on the very farm which is now theirs. Years before, to ward off suitors, the woman had declared that she would only marry a man who could take her to Tennessee, but one man accepted her dare, selling off good bottom land to do so. Now in her later years, she realizes that the new farm which they carved from the wilderness was not in Tennessee at all, but only seven miles distant over the hills. Mingling scenes from past and present, the play is rich both in atmosphere and real emotion as it unfolds its tale of lives lived sometimes perilously but always to the full-and with the indomitable spirit which characterized those who laid the foundations of a great nation.

THE STORY: Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, aged 73, rises in his tent on the morning of a battle. He is bent, snarling, formidable and sardonically funny. He addresses his army and rouses it to savage fury, then, receiving a message, commands

THE STORY: As the play begins, Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, who was Byron's only legitimate daughter, is writing her will. She is thirty-six (the same age at which her father died) and dying of cancer. While she had been estranged from her father

Retells the story of Jesus' life set as a folktale in different parts of the world

THE STORY: Seeking to retrieve his runaway wife (and the possessions she has taken with her), Coleman Shedman arrives at the rural meeting house of a southern pentecostal sect with a lawyer in tow. But his wife, Nancy, is unwilling to forsake the l

THE STORY: GINT unfolds like a strange dream, beginning with Pete Gint, a ragged young man in the Appalachian Mountains in 1917, who spends most of his time lying, drinking and getting into trouble. Gint is determined to become something great grand and

THE STORIES: Three women who were astonishing poets are the subjects of this trio of linked short plays. Ono no Komachi (Japan, 9th century), Hrosvitha (Gandersheim, Saxony, 10th century), and Anna Akhmatova (USSR, 20th century) fight for their liv

Heathen Valley, Romulus Linney's haunting and original novel, was born from the church histories of the Valle Crucis mission in western North Carolina. Told in four parts, it is a story set in an almost unknown valley, "Heathen, a valley That Forgot God." With a quiet, muscular violence and biblical grace that readers of Cormac McCarthy will recognize, Linney takes us into the 1850s, where an idealistic Bishop from New England and a life–whipped, sorrowful transient named Starns, struggle to win souls and transform the valley. Widely reviewed when it was first published in 1962 and selected as an alternate for the Book of the Month Club, Romulus Linney's first novel Heathen Valley was never reprinted and has never before been in paperback. "Starns was thirty–two years old that night, but he looked fifty. He was like a much older man who comes late in life to what learning he possesses, and therefore has no fear of what he knows he will never understand." from Heathen Valley

THE STORY: An Army general and his wife have committed a ritual double suicide during a Halloween party in the officers' club at Schofield Barracks, and now an official court of inquiry has been convened to investigate their shocking, and apparently senseless act. Those present at the affair and others who knew the general and his wife well are called to testify and, as tension mounts, a remarkable and compassionate portrait of the dead couple emerges-and, with it, a shattering awareness of the significance of their deed. Each character, in his testimony, contributes yet another insight, another piece of the mosaic, until the suicide is finally revealed and understood as an act of expiatory self-sacrifice, and a profound statement about war and killing and the responsibility of the individual. In the final essence, the play becomes not only an intense and moving emotional experience and a powerful evocation of the troubled conscience of contemporary America but also a stirring call to all of good will to reawaken their sense of responsibility for the moral and political actions of their country.