Draft:Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America

In 1985, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America was founded in order to "stimulate and advance public appreciation of the theater and related performing and dramatic arts through activities designed to increase public understanding of dramaturgy and literary management.". From its incorporation, the service organization has published essays, articles, and interviews on dramaturgy in the LMDA Review.

Michael Lupu, dramaturg at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater, distilled the characteristics of a distinctly form of American dramaturgy in an essay as “the underpinning of all intuitive or deliberate choices, thoughts, debates, and nurtures the passionate search for artistic truth on stage."

John Corbin has been described in Theater Magazine as America’s first literary manager, working under that title from 1908-1910 at the New Theatre on Central Park West for Lee Shubert.

During the 1920’s Francis Fergusson, the theater theoretician and critic, following Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s model, initiated a discussion about what might constitute an ideal theater repertory in the United States. In his 1928 “Letter to the Administration of the American Laboratory Theatre,” Ferguson, play-reader of that theater, urged Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, and their colleagues, working in the shadow of the Moscow Art Theatre, to abandon the romantic tradition of art for art’s sake and Edward Gordon Craig’s theater of pure form and acknowledge that the contemporary dramatist should rule the theater.

Arthur Ballet’s Office of Advanced Drama Research, based at his home at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s, with the financial assistance of the first grants from the Ford Foundation, helped to oversee and establish regional theaters across the country.

By the early 1960's, the newly inaugurated Ford Foundation Grants in the Arts and Humanities funded the creation of twenty-six new regional theaters, as well as the national service organization Theatre Communications Group. The National Endowment for the Arts was established soon after. When these new institutions opened in the late 1960s and began to search for staff, these and other existing theaters embraced a diverse new American playwriting movement that had begun to flourish independently at this time, hiring literary managers and dramaturgs to oversee playwriting commissions and artistic collaborations.

The administrators of these theaters, as well as those in summer new play development theaters such as The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, New Harmony Project, and Ojai Playwrights Conference began to include literary staffs in their work.

As of 2024, dramaturgy is a central element of theatre education, with undergraduate majors available in the craft, as well as Master’s and Doctorate programs