this is show me today a boy who grew up in the ozarks became one of america's leading playwrights and turned missouri people places and experiences into pulitzer prize-winning american theater the missouri press has issued another printing of a book about how lanford wilson got to fame from the town of ozark and how he took missouri with him mu theater professor david krespi edited lanford wilson early stories sketches and poems and he talks with ashley byrd

So Lanford Wilson was the reason why I came to Missouri from being a New York actor and director and writer.

And the reason why he was so important was back in the 80s and 90s, Lanford Wilson was at the heart of the New York theater, writing about rural Missouri, writing about Lebanon and Ozark and these places that New York City people had were quite mysterious to us.

And yet here was this very American Rural writer writing about the people that he knew from the Ozarks writing about and he was writing their voices as almost like an ethnographer capturing their lives capturing their their heartbreaks their their challenges and their triumphs.

Not unlike, you know, somebody like Thomas Hart Benton who also captured much of rural Missouri in his essentially kind of expressionistic Art Deco style.

So Lanford Wilson was very much of a piece with somebody like Thomas Hart Benton who created incredibly sophisticated art.

You know, Thomas Harbenton is shown in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Is this the book really that introduces the Missourian in him?