Cherokee Night and Other Plays

The author of numerous plays and film scripts, including Green Grow the Lilacs, later made into the hit musical Oklahoma!, Lynn Riggs (18991954) is recognized as one of America's most engaging dramatists and was the only active American Indian dramatist during the first half of the twentieth century. An elegant leatherbound collector's edition, The Cherokee Night and Other Plays, features his never-before-published play Out of Dust, as well as The Cherokee Night and Green Grow the Lilacs. A mixed-blood Cherokee, Riggs wrote about the people, places, and events of the Oklahoma he knew so well. A cattle rancher's son, Riggs was born in the Verdigris Valley south of Claremore in Indian Territory. He first gained recognition as a poet in the early 1920s while attending the University of Oklahoma and later moved to New York, where he worked on and around Broadway. In 1927 Riggs was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, and while in France on that fellowship, he began writing Green Grow the Lilacs, which Rodgers and Hammerstein made into the Broadway musical Oklahoma! in 1943. By the end of his life, Riggs had written some thirty plays and scripts for fourteen films produced between 1930 and 1955. In their 1939 Handbook of Oklahoma Writers, Mary Hays Marable and Elaine Boylan observe: "Lynn Riggs hitched his wagon to Pegasus and rode into the theatre with an output of poetic and regional plays that has brought him outstanding success Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) was the author of numerous plays, including Green Grow the Lilacs, the basis for the musical Oklahoma! Jace Weaver is the author of Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture and That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. "Mr. Riggs' play is the wellspring of almost all that is good in Oklahoma! I kept many of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them at all for the simple reason that they could not be improved on -- at any rate, not by me.Lynn Riggs and Green Grow the Lilacs are the very soul of Oklahoma!"-Oscar Hammerstein II in The New York Times, September 4, 1943