{"title":"Books by John Lahr","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781408831458","title":"Tennessee Williams","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe definitive biography of America’s most impassioned and lyrical twentieth-century playwright from acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e'A masterpiece about a genius'\u003c\/b\u003e Helen Mirren\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Riveting ... masterful' \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eSunday Times, \u003c\/i\u003eBooks of the Year\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of \u003ci\u003eThe Glass Menagerie\u003c\/i\u003e. Tennessee Williams, the show’s thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one paper, ‘like a farm boy in his Sunday best’. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain calls and became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an American public, Tennessee Williams’s work – blood hot and personal – pioneered, as Arthur Miller declared, ‘a revolution’ in American theatre.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTracing Williams’s turbulent moral and psychological shifts, acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his work, as well as the America his plays helped to define. Williams created characters so large that they have become part of American folklore: Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura transcend their stories, haunting us with their fierce, flawed lives. Similarly, Williams himself swung high and low in his single-minded pursuit of greatness. Lahr shows how Williams’s late-blooming homosexual rebellion, his struggle against madness, his grief-struck relationships with his combustible father, prim and pious mother and ‘mad’ sister Rose, victim to one of the first lobotomies in America, became central themes in his drama.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIncluding Williams’s poems, stories, journals and private correspondence in his discussion of the work – posthumously Williams has been regarded as one of the best letter writers of his day – Lahr delivers an astoundingly sensitive and lively reassessment of one of America’s greatest dramatists. \u003ci\u003eTennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e is the long-awaited, definitive life and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56299131208053,"sku":"9781408831458","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781408831458_8381b5b7-468a-404a-845d-d772f8f41407.jpg?v=1786019808"},{"product_id":"9780393246407","title":"Joy Ride – Show People and Their Shows","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eJoy Ride\u003c\/em\u003e throws open the stage door and introduces readers to such makers of contemporary drama as Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, Wallace Shawn, Harold Pinter, David Rabe, David Mamet, Mike Nichols, and August Wilson. Lahr takes us to the cabin in the woods that Arthur Miller built in order to write \u003cem\u003eDeath of a Salesman\u003c\/em\u003e; we walk with August Wilson through the Pittsburgh ghetto where we encounter the inspiration for his great cycle; we sit with Ingmar Bergman at the Kunglinga Theatre in Stockholm, where he attended his first play; we visit with Harold Pinter at his London home and learn the source of the feisty David Mamet's legendary ear for dialogue.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn its juxtaposition of biographical detail and critical analysis, \u003cem\u003eJoy Ride\u003c\/em\u003e explores with insight and panache not only the lives of the theatricals but the liveliness of the stage worlds they have created.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56367761490293,"sku":"9780393246407","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780393246407_098dee33-ed95-4060-8481-889e8d43960c.jpg?v=1787039816"},{"product_id":"arthur-miller","title":"Arthur Miller – American Witness","description":"A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller’s dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights  “Lahr’s cogent analyses are revelatory. . . . He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges.”—Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal  “New Yorker critic Lahr shines in this searching account of the life of playwright Arthur Miller. . . . It’s a great introduction to a giant of American letters.”—Publishers Weekly   Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915–2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life—his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller’s role as a public intellectual—this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller’s psychology and his plays.      Concentrating largely on Miller’s most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller’s early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original interpretation of Miller’s work and his personality.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57466519585141,"sku":"9780300276794","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300276794.jpg?v=1785654577"},{"product_id":"these-foolish-things","title":"These Foolish Things","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe celebrated film director Mike Nichols remarked, \"We shall never see John Lahr's likes again. . . . He stands alone not only in \u003cem\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/em\u003e but in theater criticism.\" Son of the famed comedian Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in \u003cem\u003eThe Wizard of Oz\u003c\/em\u003e, John Lahr has led a life that reads like a veritable who's who of the stage and screen, with guest appearances by Harold Pinter, Richard Avedon, Barry Humphries, Alan Bennett, and Tony Kushner, among others. In \u003cem\u003eThese Foolish Things\u003c\/em\u003e, the acclaimed author and seminal drama critic of \u003cem\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/em\u003e for more than twenty years captures the events and people who have transformed his life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom a picture frame with a faded engraving to a birthday card with the outline of a loving hand, Lahr assembles a droll and insightful mosaic of chapters inspired by the objects that still connect him to his past. He recalls his boyhood growing up in a show business family; his apprenticeship in the 1960s underground press; his turn as an award-winning co-author of \u003cem\u003eElaine Stritch at Liberty\u003c\/em\u003e; and his fabulous career at \u003cem\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/em\u003e, where he published nearly a million words. Called “one of the greatest biographers writing today” (\u003cem\u003eObserver\u003c\/em\u003e), Lahr gives a penetrating account of his determination to bring the stories of Joe Orton, Dame Edna Everage, Bill Hicks, Elaine Stritch, and Tennessee Williams into print.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLahr also reflects on the influences, for better and for worse, of his relationships with a saturnine father and narcissistic mother, his enduring affection for his early caretaker Georgie, and his romance with the love of his life, his wife, Connie Booth. A moving and delightfully entertaining capstone to an amazing career, \u003cem\u003eThese Foolish Things\u003c\/em\u003e is an unconventional self-portrait from the premier American theater critic of his time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57555413500277,"sku":"9781324036364","price":24.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-john-lahr.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}