History Essay: Sherwood and Lincoln

Sherwood and Lincoln
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Sherwood and Lincoln
The greatest works of art and literature tend to reflect high levels of intelligence and unique thought patterns and imaginations that function to capture the attention of the target audience while also inducing equally diverse reactions from the same. Authors, poets, and playwrights, for instance, make for some of the known professionals in the field of literature who commit to executing their mandates with utmost excellence towards feeding the insatiable demand for their works. The different genres of literature materials, including stories, novels, poems, and even plays, offer different values to their equally diverse audiences. However, effective delivery of the intended message to the reader or attaining a desired effect on the target audience requires an understanding of the readers, listeners, and the audience to a play or film. In essence, the person behind a given content in a literature material has to have an expectation of how the audience will react to the same. Such expectations may form around their personal experiences with situations upon which they develop their content or their interactions and integration with the target audience for their literature materials. Robert Sherwood makes for one of the renowned playwrights in the United States for his great contribution and revolutionary works in the industry that resonated with emerging events and occurrences of his time. He is known for his skilful expertise in the creation and direction of plays in the 1930s that won accolades and criticism in almost equal measure. Among his outstanding works in the competitive field was Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which besides winning him a second Pulitzer also showcased his unmatched skills as a historian with remarkable skills as a researcher and a communicator of his historical accounts or findings. Provided herein is a comprehensive evaluation of the renowned playwright as a historian through the lens of his presentation and delivery of the intended message to the audience in his work, Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
A biography of Robert Emmet Sherwood reveals him to be a conflicted intellectual who is alert to the occurrences around his immediate and extended environments and thus making him question the motive or factors facilitating such events[1]. It is in his soul searching experiences that Sherwood embarks on a journey to discovering the different social, political, and economic ideologies at play across the world and their role in facilitating various events such as the World Wars. The playwright’s inquisitive nature grounded in finding his position or ideological identity on matters of the world formed the basis for his exemplary skills as a historian. Robert Sherwood, for instance, took part in the First World War upon joining the Canadian Black Watch and thus gaining first-hand experience of the historic event. It suffices to say that it was his experience in the war that led him to resonate with fellow intellectuals in the United States in condemning the country’s position on war and refusing any form of justification for the same[2]. In essence, Sherwood’s experiences in the war created a foundation for developing an inquisitive ...