Like many of Levin's works, General Seeger was at the vanguard – here, casting a critical lens at the military's PR machine, 20 years before works such as 1979's critically-acclaimed television adaptation of "Friendly Fire" did.

General Seeger is one of a triad of military plays written by Levin – the others being No Time For Sergeants and Notebook Warrior. Just as Levin did with Notebook Warrior, he "wrote what he knew," extrapolating from his own experience as a private in the Army's Public Information Office at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey:

“One day in 1954, a 24-year-old private first class, Ira Levin, chanced to glance up from his desk in the public information office of a New Jersey Army camp just as the commanding general passed the door. It occurred to Levin then, for the first time, that the General, after all was a human being. And he began to wonder what sort of a human being the General was. What was his life like, what forces drove him? The fruit of Levin's speculation may be seen at the Shubert Theater beginning Thursday. It is a play titled “General Seeger,” and as Levin is the first to admit, it probably hears little resemblance to the original General. Levin cannot be sure, for he never saw the General again; the whole play is a product of the New York playwright's imagination.”
    —Ron Martin, Detroit Free Press (1962)

(Above) George C. Scott and William Bendix on first day of rehearsals (Credit: Bert Emanuele for Detroit Free Press)