Why Marry?

Why Marry? is a three-act comedy by Jesse Lynch Williams, first published as And So They Were Married in 1914, produced under its new title in 1917, and revised in 1918. It won the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

During a weekend at John and Lucy's country house, Jean and Rex prepare for a conventional marriage while their relatives offer incompatible advice. The household gathers five couples as social arguments about love, money, authority, divorce, and respectability.

John's independent sister Helen and the scientist Ernest love one another but reject a legal arrangement they believe would compromise their work and equality. Their plan to live together unmarried turns private conviction into family scandal.

The clergyman Theodore, the divorce-minded Judge, and the unhappily married couples expose contradictions within every fixed position. Williams uses rapid debate and reversal to ask which marriage deserves moral authority, even as comedy drives the group toward ceremonies.

"Up from the fragrant garden comes a girl, running. She takes the broad terrace steps two at a stride, laughing, breathless, fleet as a fawn, sweet as a rose. She is hotly pursued by a boy, handsome, ardent, attractively selfish, and just now blindly determined to catch the pretty creature before she gains the protecting shelter of home."

This download follows the new and revised edition published by Charles Scribner's Sons in April 1918.