Amid the hundreds of "how-to" books that have appeared in recent years, there have been very few which attempted to analyze the mysteries of play-construction. This book does that -- and its principles are so valid that they apply equally well to the short story, novel and screenplay. Lajos Egri examines a play from the inside out, starting with the heart of any drama: its characters. For it is people -- their private natures and their inter-relationships -- that move a story and give it life. All good dramatic writing depends upon an understanding of human motives. Why do people act as they do? What forces transform a coward into a hero, a hero into a coward? What is it that Romeo does early in Shakespeare's play that makes his later suicide seem inevitable? Why must Nora leave her husband at the end of A Doll's House? These are a few of the fascinating problems which Egri analyzes. He shows how it is essential for the author to have a basic premise -- a thesis, demonstrated in terms of human behavior -- and to develop his dramatic conflict on the basis of that behavior. Premise, character, conflict: this is Egri's ABC. His book is a direct, jargon-free approach to the problem of achieving truth in a literary creation.

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Chapter One: A Strategy to Defeat World Hunger

In the blistering, heart-rending drought and depression days of 1932 I was a ten-year-old boy growing up in Mitchell, South Dakota. Most of the time I was a contented youngster, but some memories are not pleasant. A lifetime later, I recall the huge boiling dust clouds that rolled across the parched Dakota plains, hiding the sun in a darkness like midnight. The finely ground dirt not only blackened the sky; it came hard at the crevices of our eyes, ears, noses, and throats. The tiniest cracks or openings in windows and doors ushered the dust inside.

The first such fearful storm that I remember happened during a summer hike several miles east of Mitchell with my boyhood friend Vernon Hersey. After failing efforts to grope our way in the blinding dust to a country road, Vernon suggested that the Milwaukee railroad tracks would lead us back to Mitchell. We followed them homeward, listening over the howling wind for a train whistle.

When the Dakota sun was not blotted out by dust storms, it was frequently shrouded by flying grasshopper invasions. They could strip growing crops down to the ground in a matter of hours. Farmers who had invested their cash and months of labor in planting and nurturing crops would watch their harvest disappear. The voracious pests would even devour the wooden handles of hoes and pitchforks.

My father was a Wesleyan Methodist clergyman who believed in God, John Wesley , and the St. Louis Cardinals. This "Holy Trinity" helped our household get through the Depression. I knew about the Twelve Apostles, but I knew even more about the CardinalsGashouse Gang