Screenwriters, once only needed to provide continuity and dialogue in the form of title cards for silent movies, achieved true prominence with the advent of sound in 1927. Over the years, as the landscape of American film has grown and developed into an art form, the screenplay has emerged as a new form of literature . The motion-picture writers covered in American Screenwriters are a representative – yet significant – sampling, ranging from the artistically important to the commercially successful to the relatively obscure.

65 entries include: James Agee, Mel Brooks, Sidney Buchman, Delmore Daves, Horton Foote, Howard Koch, Herman Mankiewicz, Rod Serling, Donald Ogden Stewart, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder.