The Hairy Ape is an expressionist drama, written during the literary modernist period, which spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The play was published in 1922 and written in 1921. As a modernist play, The Hairy Ape deals with many of the ideas and themes that flooded the zeitgeist in the 1920s. As the text makes clear, one such concept was that of worker rights, which became sorely needed in the face of the increased exploitation that accompanied industrialization. In addition to themes of class struggle, literary works within the modernist genre also frequently address concerns of technology vs. humanity, scientific innovation (e.g. evolution, genetics/genetic engineering), population, isolation/alienation, and the “moral quality” of the populace (i.e. eugenics, social Darwinism).
The Hairy Ape can also be categorized as an expressionist play. Like its artistic counterparts, expressionism as a literary genre was typically more concerned with commenting on "types"—that is, on specific stereotypes or caricatures of the time and how they reflect on society. Most if not all of the characters in The Hairy Ape reflect these types: Mildred is the young, rich, idealistic white woman whose family comes from industry; Yank is the downtrodden yet hopeful working class man who becomes disillusioned with the world.
