The Mercury Theatre on the Air

The Mercury Theatre on the Air is an American radio anthology series created in 1938 by Orson Welles and producer John Houseman, adapting classic and contemporary literary works into hour-long dramas performed by Welles's Mercury Theatre repertory company on CBS. The series became a showcase for Welles's inventive use of sound, music and narration to build atmosphere without visual staging, and its literary ambitions set it apart from more formulaic commercial radio drama of the period. The series is most widely remembered for its October 30, 1938 broadcast adapting H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds as a sequence of simulated news bulletins, an episode recorded separately in this atlas as its own landmark broadcast, but the series as a whole is regarded as one of the most artistically significant dramatic anthologies in the history of American radio.