The middle of the 20th century is littered with American authors known as much for their ennui as the liver pickling it gave rise to. The greatest rogue among them, perhaps, was the now-nearly-forgotten playwright Martin Thrush. Born on Easter Sunday, 1912, exactly one week before the Titanic met its icy fate, Thrush was educated at an all-boys parochial school in Queens. He dropped out, however-or was kicked out, the biographical record remains unclear-and ended up working for a time as a cobbler's apprentice in Greenwich Village, just around the corner from The Cherry Lane Theatre. It was there that Thrush fell in love with the stage, and, in the decades that followed, he worked feverishly on the plays that would solidify his reputation as one of the great geniuses of the avant garde counterculture fomenting at that time. Written in the early years of the Cold War just as the Space Race was starting to heat up, The Uncanny (1954) is the second of Thrush's surviving works and by far his most autobiographical and most prophetic. From 1947 to 1952, the tortured playwright and lapsed Catholic found himself stretched out on the analyst's couch. Claiming in a letter to a friend dated January 2nd, 1953 that he had "made [himself] vulnerable to the prods and probes of a world-class sadist," Thrush cut the analysis short and vowed never to step foot in a therapist's office again.

As far as scholars can tell, he kept his word, but used the writing of The Uncanny as its own kind of therapy, applying the insights of Freud to his vocation as a writer and the cross he chose to bear alone as a thoroughly tormented soul.