Mercury Theater on the Air's

Seventeen

by Booth Tarkington

 Produced, directed and scripted by Orson Welles

October 15th 1938
Starring Orson Welles

The hilarious misadventures of a small town boy
who falls head-over-heels in love with a beautiful stranger

Newton Booth Tarkington: His most characteristic and popular works were his genial novels of life in small Middle Western towns, including The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), The Conquest of Canaan (1905), and the trilogy Growth (1927), made up of Turmoil (1915), The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; Pulitzer Prize), and The Midlander (1923). Alice Adams (1921; Pulitzer Prize), considered by some his best novel, tells of the frustrated ambitions of a romantic lower-middle-class girl. He wrote several amusing novels of boyhood and adolescence, the most notable being Penrod (1914) and Seventeen (1916). His plays include a dramatization of his own historical romance Monsieur Beaucaire (1901) and Clarence (1921)

The finest radio drama of the 1930 s was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman.

In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown.

The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up by Campbell s Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse.

Approximate play time of 1 hour.

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