Planet Podcasts
← Broadway on the Air

1941–1945 · CBS and combined networks

Norman Corwin

The poet the networks handed a microphone

Corwin is the answer to the question of whether radio ever produced literature. CBS gave him an unheard-of freedom — write what you like, weekly, with an orchestra — and he used it to write verse for a mass audience that had no idea it was listening to verse. We Hold These Truths went out eight days after Pearl Harbor on every network at once. On a Note of Triumph, broadcast the afternoon Germany surrendered, asks who exactly won and what they are owed, and it is still the least sentimental thing anyone said out loud that day.

3 broadcasts · 2 seasons held · CBS, New York

19412

Norman Corwin

The Odyssey of Runyon Jones

1 Jan 1941 · 28 min

A boy searches the afterlife for his dog. One of the twenty-six programmes Corwin wrote, produced and directed at the rate of one a week for the Columbia Workshop.

Norman Corwin

We Hold These Truths

15 Dec 1941 · 1h 0m

Commissioned for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Bill of Rights and broadcast eight days after Pearl Harbor, simultaneously on all four American networks — the largest audience a radio play has ever had.

19451

Norman Corwin

On a Note of Triumph

8 May 1945 · 58 min

Corwin's V-E Day programme, written and broadcast the day Germany surrendered and heard by an estimated sixty million Americans. CBS.