PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS asking me about Oklahoma. Sometimes they say: “I know a lot about Oklahoma, from your plays.” This always makes me ill at ease. The range of life there is not to be indicated, much less its meaning laid bare, by a few people in a few plays. Some day, perhaps, all the plays I will have written, taken together, may constitute a study from which certain things may emerge and be formulated into a kind of truth about people who happen to be living in Oklahoma instead of South Dakota. But not now. The secret is scattered too widely—and what is worse, hid away—in the breasts of too many people. Farm people, ranchers, lawyers, bankers, doctors, waitresses, bakers, tool dressers, school teachers—there, as everywhere, unite in a…
