Philip Edward (Ted) Stevenson, son of Richard and Martha Stevenson, was born December 31, 1896, in New York City. He was one of five children. Despite a slight limp resulting from childhood polio, Stevenson volunteered for service and served as a naval lieutenant in World War I. He returned to Harvard after the war and received a BA degree in 1919. After graduation he began to teach in a boy's prep school in New England.
Stevenson contracted tuberculosis and spent a year at a sanitorium in Saranac, New York. He began writing during this time, and his first story, Reward of a Prodigal, was published in 1920. In 1922, Stevenson moved to New Mexico on the advice of his doctor, and continued writing there. Several one-act plays and the first two novels of a projected trilogy, The Edge of the Nest and The Gospel According to St. Luke's, were written during this period. The third book in the series “The Pig-Iron Venus” was never published. Stevenson was much attracted by the beauty of the Southwest, and by the Indian, Mexican, and other workers there. He became closely involved in the coal and hard-rock miners' struggles, which became the subjects of much of his later writing. Throughout his life Stevenson was concerned about social justice, peace, and brotherhood, which influenced the choice of subjects in his writing.
Stevenson was in sufficiently good health in the mid-1930s to return to New York, although in 1933 he spent several months as camp superintendent for a sawmill conservation camp project sponsored by the federal government on the Zuni Reservation in New Mexico. Several members of Stevenson's family, including his first wife, Gladys, and at least one of his older sons, made their permanent homes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
At about the same time Stevenson espoused the philosophy of Marxism, and became critical of what he perceived as evils in society. In 1934 he turned to playwriting, and during the next four years wrote a number of one-act plays for the labor and progressive theater. Three of the plays, The Gentleman from Hooverville, God's in His Heaven, and Road Closed, became a trilogy on the depression, entitled Big Wind. For the next few years, in addition to writing, he worked with the New Theatre League and as a public relations man for the Playwrights' Company.
During the 1940s, Stevenson collaborated with his second wife, Janet Marshall Stevenson, on the play Counterattack, based on the Russian play “Pobyeda” (“Victory”), and concerning the war on the eastern front. The play was produced in New York and later made into a film. The Stevensons also collaborated on Declaration (1948), a play about Thomas Jefferson and the early American struggle for democracy. From 1944 until he was blacklisted in 1951, Philip Stevenson also worked in film. He was a screenwriter for The Story of G.I. Joe (nominated as Best Picture of the Year, 1954) and The Girl in White.
In 1947, during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigation of Communism and Hollywood personalities, Stevenson worked with the Defense Committee of the Hollywood Ten. He was one of the group which brought suit against those producers who blacklisted writers and directors as a result of the Congressional hearings. Stevenson himself was also blacklisted in 1951 for refusing to testify before HUAC. As a result, some of
his later writing was done under the pseudonyms “Lars Lawrence” and “Henry Arndt.” Stevenson also wrote anti-HUAC political pamphlets at this time, his most notable being Courage Is Contagious (1953).
In 1948 Stevenson started work on his monumental multi-volume work, The Seed, which occupied much of his time and effort until 1960. Like his earlier multi-volume project, the theme of The Seed was the biblical parable of the sower of the seed and its revolutionary significance. The works were set in the fictional company-owned Southwest community of Reata. The first volume was divided in two parts, Morning Noon and Night (published in 1954) and Out of the Dust (1956). The second part of the trilogy was similarly divided, into Old Father Antic (Falstaff's characterization of the law) and The Hoax, both published in 1960. The third volume, The Sowing, was unpublished at the time of Stevenson's death.
Stevenson was a founder and editor (1951-1956) of the magazine California Quarterly, and was a contributing editor of Masses and Mainstream. Throughout his life, Stevenson worked at other occupations to support himself and his family. Among his other activities were teaching school, private tutoring, doing manual labor, managing a public works camp on a Zuni Indian reservation, as well as working as a publicist in New York. He died in the Soviet Union, September 22, 1965, while on a tour of Europe.
