In the late 1920s, the first two plays attributed to Ferdinand Bruckner, Youth Is a Sickness and Criminals, were ""hot tickets"", but only gradually was the pseudonymous author identified. Bruckner continues to be an understudied figure, and this updated translation of two of his most well-known plays will be the definitive version for those interested in better understanding his legacy.

FERDINAND BRUCKNER, born Theodor Tagger in 1891, was an Austro-German poet, playwright, and theater manager. In 1922, he founded the Berlin Renaissance Theater. He immigrated to Paris in 1933, from there to the United States in 1936, and eventually returned to Berlin, where he worked as an adviser to the Schiller Theater.

LAURENCE SENELICK is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University. He is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, the most recent being The Soviet Theater: A Documentary History (with Sergei Ostrovsky); Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters; The American Stage: Writing on the American Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner; and Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture.