Eric, in fact, loved popular theatre; he dedicated The Theory of the Modern Stage to the "creator of the first people's theatre in the new world," Hallie Flanagan Davis, director of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project. In his "Forward" to the seminal book The Playwright as Thinker (1946), Eric denounces Schubert's confusion of money with value, wittily castigating the flotsam of Broadway and asserting that the "most revolutionary tenet to be advanced in this book is this: the drama can be taken seriously." In Search of Theatre (1953), The Dramatic Event (1954), and What Is Theatre (1968)? "Has there ever been," writes Richard Gilman, "journalistic reviewing in America so supple, witty, deep and unaccommodating?" And then, because there was no anthology of modern theatrical theory, Eric created one; he went to the original sources, sought translators, and produced the indispensable The Theory of the Modern Stage (1968).