Ludwig is a highly successful writer for the theater. His precision-timed farces Lend Me a Tenor and Moon Over Buffalo enjoyed long-runs on Broadway and in London. He wrote the libretto to Crazy for You, a musical built around the songs of George Gershwin, which was also a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Before making his mark in the theater, Ludwig, a man of many interests, practiced law in Washington, DC for several years and still retains an "of counsel" position with the firm of Steptoe and Johnson.
Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible are, in Ludwig's view, the two "bedrocks" of modern civilization in the English-speaking world. "For more than five thousand years Moses, Jesus, and other towering figures of the Old and New Testaments were the archetypes of our consciousness. In modern society Hamlet and Macbeth, Juliet and Ophelia, have been added to their number," Ludwig writes in the early pages of the book, which was recently published by Crown, a division of Random House.
