Editor's note.

In an attempt to summarize the process of the first ten years of founding and editing this journal, we published an essay, "Ten Years of American Drama" (Vol 10, No. 1). In that same essay I asked readers to comment on my history of the journal and also to let me know what direction we should be taking in the next ten years. I drew readers' attention to some plans that had been suggested to me and outlined some possible new directions, like a stress on pedagogy or the publishing of actual playscripts. In the year since we published that essay, we have received many responses. Most were brief and congratulatory, but some did make suggestions. We have chosen one letter which was the longest and most thorough consideration of the questions raised in my essay. I appreciate the time and effort that Marcia Noe devoted to her thoughtful and full response, and I believe that it provides a fair reflection of the other briefer responses. I am happy to continue the dialogue, and I hope that readers will send letters eit her to the journal American Drama or electronically to the online supplement to American Drama: "Spotlight on American Drama" (www.AmericanDrama.org).

It gives me great pleasure to report to our readers that we have reached another milestone in our advancement of scholarship in American drama. In the next few months, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. will publish a new anthology of essays on American drama. Entitled New Readings in American Drama: Something's Happening Here, this collection brings together and makes available for the first time in one volume nineteen of the best essays published on twentieth-century American playwrights in the first ten years of this journal's life. We hope that all our readers share our excitement that work that we deemed worthy to publish in journal form is now being gathered into a more permanent book form. We hope that all our supporters, subscribers and contributors will ask their libraries to order the book so that this concentrated wealth of new research on American dramatic literature will become more readily available to a growing number of students and interested readers.

In this special issue devoted to gender we announce the topic for next year's special issue. We are a nation at war--for the first time since the inception of the journal. We now understand better that this journal is a post--Cold War project. Its impetus has been the integration of critical theory into the discussion of dramatic literature, and its outcome has been liberating on a genre that has felt severe social and political constraints since the onslaught of McCarthyism. We have announced "American Wars" as the topic for our next special issue and ask that scholars look at the ways the experience of war has been dramatized in America from colonial times to the present.

Finally, we are gratified by the popularity and success of our new Internet venture, AmericanDrama.org. Over hundreds of hits a day testify to the power of the website and raise the tantalizing prospect of an ever expanding community of people around the globe who are curious about American Drama. Please continue to write to the website and to ask your questions about the field. We try to provide answers and resources to people who correspond with us from all over the world. Please also feel free to suggest what other ways we can add to and improve the website in order to advance the knowledge and prestige of that huge body of creative work that makes up the American dramatic legacy.

Norma Jenckes