James Hurt "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" Scripts, 1980 and 2008 | Illinois History and Lincoln Collections

Scope and Contents:

This collection contains two copies of the script for "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" written by James Hurt in 1980. The play depicts Abraham Lincoln's legacy as viewed by three great Illinois poets, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg. Hurt mixed dramatizations of the poets' youthful experiences with accounts of national events in the fifty years following Lincoln's death in order to show how Lincoln's idealism shaped each poet's work and life.

Biographical/Historical Context:

"Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" was a play written by James Hurt, an English professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and performed by the Great American People Show, a summer theatrical company directed by John Ahart and based in New Salem in Petersburg, Illinois. The play was performed in repertory, first with "Your Obedient Servant, A. Lincoln" and then "Even We Here."

Acquisition Source: James Hurt donated a photocopy of the script to the Library in 1990. A second copy, prepared for a script-in-hand reading performance by the University of Illinois Summer Studio Theatre Company (Department of Theatre, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts), was acquired by the Library in 2008.