Stark Young Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" (1936) and its film adaptation of 1939 pushed Young's book into the background. Young translated a number of plays by Anton Chekhov, including "The Sea Gull", "Uncle Vanya", "The Three Sisters", and "The Cherry Orchard", all of which were published in 1956 by The Modern Library as "Best Plays by Chekhov". In the 1940s Young, a self-taught artist, began painting. He had two one-man exhibitions in New York. His paintings were shown in four important venues, including the Art Institute of Chicago, which purchased one of his works for its permanent collection. In 1951
Ann Dunnigan but Dunnigan contested that van Itallie's translation was nearly identical to hers, and sued him. In the settlement that followed, van Itallie accepted responsibility for the legal costs, and agreed to cease promotion of his version. Years later, van Itallie applied himself to new renderings of "The Cherry Orchard", "The Seagull", "Three Sisters", and "Uncle Vanya". In the introduction to Applause Books' 1995 compilation of these, van Itallie asserts that he "worked on "The Sea Gull", and later the other three plays, with a specially-made literal English translation and a selection of French translations." Dunnigan's final stage performance was in