This fully annotated selection of Elia Kazan’s letters reveals all the passion, vitality, and raw honesty that made him such a towering figure in American theater and film. Kazan’s determination to be a “sincere, conscious, practicing artist” resounds through every phase of his career: his apprenticeship with the Group Theatre, his co-founding of the Actors Studio and co-direction of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, and his innovative directing on Broadway (A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman) and in Hollywood (On the Waterfront and East of Eden). Kazan collaborated with some of the greatest writers of the era, including Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, and John Steinbeck. His letters to and about Marlon Brando, James Dean, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, and others are full of insights on acting and directing. We see his heated dealings with studio moguls, his principled resistance to censorship, the upheavals of testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We glimpse his inner life in his startlingly candid letters to his first wife and those to and about his children. The Selected Letters provides an extraordinary portrait of a complex, intense, monumentally talented man who engaged the political, moral, and artistic currents of the twentieth century.

Elia Kazan was the twentieth century’s most celebrated director of both stage and screen, and this monumental, revelatory book shows us the master at work. Kazan’s list of Broadway and Hollywood successes—A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, On the Waterfront, to name a few—is a testament to his profound impact on the art of directing. This remarkable book, drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews, and autobiography, reveals Kazan’s method: how he uncovered the “spine,” or core, of each script; how he analyzed each piece in terms of his own experience; and how he determined the specifics of his production. And in the final section, “The Pleasures of Directing”—written during Kazan’s final years—he becomes a wise old pro offering advice and insight for budding artists, writers, actors, and directors.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • In this amazing autobiography, Kazan at seventy-eight brings us the undiluted telling of his story—and revelation of himself—all the passion, vitality, and truth, the almost outrageous honesty, that have made him so formidable a stage director (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tea and Sympathy), film director (On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Gentleman’s Agreement, Splendor in the Grass, Baby Doll, The Last Tycoon, A Face in the Crowd), and novelist (the number-one best-seller The Arrangement.) “This is the best autobiography I’ve read by a prominent American in I don’t know how many years. It is endlessly absorbing and I believe this is because it concerns a man who is looking to find a coherent philosophy that will be tough enough to contain all that is ugly in his person and his experience, yet shall prove sufficiently compassionate to give honest judgment on himself and others. Somehow, the author brings this off. Elia Kazan: A Life has that candor of confession which is possible only when the deepest wounds have healed and honesty can achieve what honesty so rarely arrives at—a rich and hearty flavor. By such means, a famous director has written a book that offers the kind of human wealth we find in a major novel.” —Norman Mailer Kazan gives us his sense of himself as an outsider (a Greek rug merchant’s son born in Turkey, an immigrant’s son raised in New York and educated at Williams College). He takes us into the almost accidental sojourn at the Yale Drama School that triggered his commitment to theatre, and his edgy, exciting apprenticeship with the new and astonishing Group Theatre, as stagehand and stage manager—and as actor (Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy) . . . his first nervous and then successful attempts at directing for theatre and movies (The Skin of Our Teeth, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) . . . his return to New York to co-found the Actors Studio (and his long and ambivalent relationship with Lee Strasberg) . . . his emergence as premier director on both coasts. With his director’s eye for the telling scene, Kazan shares the joys and complications of production, his unique insights on acting, directing, and producing. He makes us feel the close presence of the actors, producers, and writers he’s worked with—James Dean, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Vivien Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Sam Spiegel, Darryl Zanuck, Harold Clurman, Arthur Miller, Budd Schulberg, James Baldwin, Clifford Odets, and John Steinbeck among them. He gives us a frank and affectionate portrait of Marilyn Monroe. He talks with startling candor about himself as husband and—in the years where he obsessively sought adventure outside marriage—as lover. For the first time, he discusses his Communist Party years and his wrenching decision in 1952 to be a cooperative witness before HUAC. He writes about his birth as a writer. The pace and organic drama of his narrative, his grasp of the life and politics of Broadway and Hollywood, the keenness with which he observes the men and women and worlds around him, and, above all, the honest with which he pursues and captures his own essence, make this one of the most fascinating autobiographies of our time.

"There isn't a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."--Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post

The product of a lifetime immersed in the literary, performing arts, and entertainment worlds, Robert Gottlieb's Lives and Letters spotlights the work, careers, intimate lives, and lasting achievements of a vast array of celebrated writers and performers in film, theater, and dance, and some of the more curious iconic public figures of our times. From the world of literature, Charles Dickens, James Thurber, Judith Krantz, John Steinbeck, and Rudyard Kipling; the controversies surrounding Bruno Bettelheim and Elia Kazan; and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her editor, Maxwell Perkins. From dance and theater, Isadora Duncan and Margot Fonteyn, Serge Diaghilev and George Balanchine, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. In Hollywood, Bing Crosby and Judy Garland, Douglas Fairbanks and Lillian Gish, Tallulah Bankhead and Katharine Hepburn, Mae West and Anna May Wong. In New York, Diana Vreeland, the Trumps, and Gottlieb's own take on the contretemps that followed his replacing William Shawn at The New Yorker. And so much more . . .

Tennessee Williams' witty, engaging, and elegant essays are now available in a revised and much expanded edition.

Tennessee Williams wrote to family, friends and fellow artists with equal measures of piety, wit, and astute self-knowledge. Presented with a running commentary to separate Williams' often hilarious, but sometimes devious, counter-reality from the truth, the letters form a kind of autobiography.

The first book-length biography of a theater icon South Pacific. The Sound of Music. Peter Pan. As the star of these classic Broadway musicals, Mary Martin captivated theater audiences with her impish persona and magnificent voice. Now Ronald L. Davis fills a major gap in theater history, moving beyond Martin’s own 1976 memoir to provide a complete picture of her life and career. Lively and engaging, Davis’s biography is the first book-length portrait of the theater icon, spanning her lifetime to reveal facts about her childhood, marriages, and friendships—as well as artistic collaborations that included the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, and Elia Kazan. Born in Weatherford, Texas, and mother to the future actor Larry Hagman, Martin went to California after the failure of her first marriage. There, she auditioned for every studio without success. “Audition Mary” finally had her big break when she won a talent contest, leading to her breakthrough 1938 performance in Leave It to Me—in which she wowed audiences singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Davis traces Martin’s numerous appearances on Broadway, in touring productions, and on television, showing how—through hard work and persistent optimism—she built a career that lasted nearly fifty years and earned her the adoration and respect of fans and colleagues alike. Because Martin’s life was entwined with many luminaries of the stage, this biography offers rich insights into theater history, including accounts of how various productions were developed. No other book tells her story in such detail—it is must reading for fans and an essential resource for theater aficionados everywhere.

The first comprehensive study of British and American films adapted from modern British plays.