Inherit the WindIn 1955, the play Inherit the Wind opened on Broadway at the National Theater. Its plot was loosely based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, that began a generation earlier, on 10 Jul 1925. The playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee did not write it be a historically accurate presentation, but to dramatize the climate of anxiety and anti-intellectualism resulting from the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Character names were changed, fictional ones added, and plot was written for dramatic effect. It was critically well-received. When made into a movie in 1960 by Stanley Kramer, the trial's circus atmosphere was highlighted. A made-for-TV rewrite of the movie was broadcast by NBC in 1988.« |
