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And that's what he did.

That third year he wrote plays with a fury.

I believe there are seventeen short plays by Tom now housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard ; ;

I think I'm right in that figure.

That fall he submitted to Professor Baker the first acts and outlines of the following acts of several plays, six of them, according to some of his associates, and he also worked on a play that he first called Niggertown, the material for which he had collected during the summer at home.

Later this play would be called Welcome To Our City.

In the spring, it must have been, he began working on the play that he called The House, which later would be Mannerhouse.

That spring Welcome To Our City was selected for production by the 47 Workshop and it was staged in the middle of May.

It ran two nights, and though it was generally praised, there was considerable criticism of its length.

It ran until past one o'clock.

That was Tom's weakness ; ;

it was demonstrated, many critics would later point out, in the length of his novels.

In this play there were so many characters and so much detail.

Tom never knew how to condense, to boil down.

He was always concerned with life, and he tried to picture it whole ; ;

he wanted nothing compressed, tight.

He was a big man, and he wanted nothing little, squeezed ; ;

he despised parsimony, and particularly of words.

In this play there were some thirty or more named characters and I don't know how many more unnamed.

In describing it to Professor Baker after it had been chosen for production, he defended his great array of characters by declaring that he had included that many not because `` I didn't know how to save paint '', but because the play required them.

And he threatened someday to write a play `` with fifty, eighty, a hundred people -- a whole town, a whole race, a whole epoch ''.

He said he would do it, though probably nobody would produce it, for his own `` soul's ease and comfort ''.