Riggs, Rollie Lynn (1899–1954). Roadside: a comedy. New York: Samuel French, 1930. First edition. Small tear to top of spine panel, otherwise very good.

Publisher’s file copy, with holographic revisions and typed insertions by the author.

A ribald, anarchic play set in the Oklahoma territories, centered on the rollicking figure of Texas, a “world-slingin’, star-traipsin’ son-of-a-gun” who claimed to be born “full-size, dressed to kill, in a ten-gallon hat, boots and chaps, a gun in ary hand and both guns a-poppin’!” Though a perennial favorite with audiences, Roadside would consistently fail to please the critics -- a situation Barrett Clark would attribute to poor production rather than inferior writing. Some critics agreed. In 1931, Gilbert Gabriel of the American noted that reading Riggs' play was more pleasurable than watching the Broadway production.

This copy is probably from the collection of his friend Barrett H. Clark (1890–1953), who edited the publications of Samuel French, Inc. The bulk of his archives are at Yale University. The book, marked “Revised by the author,” contains Riggs’s manuscript emendations and typed insertions. Some of the latter are substantial indeed. For example, in the published version, Act II closes with Pap Rader’s admiring declaration, “My, I like that feller!” Riggs adds several pages of additional dialogue, and moves the dividing line by making the first scene of Act III to the final scene of Act II.

Riggs would return to Roadside repeatedly over his career. He introduced the hero of the play in 1928 in a one-act piece called Reckless, and he reprised the play in 1941 under a new title, Borned in Texas, reworking it further for a 1950 production starring Anthony Quinn. If Riggs had intended his revisions to be printed in an omnibus edition of his works he would be disappointed. Roadside was not included in his Four plays (1947), and though it was reprinted in Twenty-five modern plays edited by Marion Tucker and Alan S. Downer (1948), they did not include his revisions. This copy will be foundational for establishing the preferred text of Riggs’s picaresque American classic.

Selected References

• Braunlich, Phyllis Cole. Haunted by home: the life and letters of Lynn Riggs. University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
• Clark, Barrett H. "The critics and Roadside," The Drama 21 (November 1930): 17.
• Tucker, S. Marion and Alan S. Downer, Twenty-five modern plays. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948