"Historical sociology, de-construction, psychoanalysis, and rhetorical analysis are just a few of the techniques used with great subtlety and sophistication in this study of gender in the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. David Savran gives us a sobering portrait of the patriarchal postwar epoch in the United States." - Edmund White author of "A boy's own story" and "The beautiful room is empty" "David Savran's "Communists, cowboys,and queers" is a passionately conceived and beautifully articulated work that not only throws new light on American dramatic literature but illuminates in a new way an entire cultural epoch." - Martin Duberman author of "Cures" and Distinguished Professor of History "Graduate Center, CUNY " During the late 1940s and 1950s, argues Savran, the baiting and brutalization of "communists and queers" were high on the American national agenda. "...offers an important and illuminating perspective on two major figures of American modernism. I know of no book that has set out similar goals and achieved them with such careful scholarship and stylistic sophistication." - Elin Diamond Rutgers University David Savran is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Breaking the rules: the Wooster group and In their own words: contemporary American playwrights.