Lars Lawrence
Lawrence, Lars
(pseudonym of Philip Stevenson). Born Dec. 31, 1896, in New York; died Sept. 21, 1965, in Alma-Ata. American writer. Son of a lawyer.
In the 1930’s, Lawrence participated in the American labor movement and was secretary of the League of American Writers (1937). In 1947 he joined the editorial board of the magazine Mainstream. Lawrence’s outstanding works were the plays Declaration, about T. Jefferson, and Counterattack (1942), based on the play Victory (1937) by the Soviet playwrights I. Vershinin and M. Ruderman. A broad panorama of America’s social and psychological conflicts in the 1930’s is developed in Lawrence’s dramatic trilogy The Storm and the multivolume novel series The Seed (1954-61), made up of the novels Morning, Noon, and Night (1954), Out of the Dust (1956), Old Father Antic (1961), and The Hoax (1961).