John Osborne
The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, shocked and transformed British theater in the 1950s with his play Look Back in Anger. This startling biography–the first to draw on the secret notebooks in which he recorded his anguish and depression–reveals the notorious rebel in all his heartrending complexity.
Through a working-class childhood and five marriages, Osborne led a tumultuous life. An impossible father, he threw his teenage daughter out of the house and never spoke to her again. His last written words were "I have sinned." Theater critic John Heilpern’s detailed portrait, including interviews with Osborne's daughter, scores of friends and enemies, and his alleged male lover, shows us a contradictory genius–an ogre with charm, a radical who hated change, and above all, a defiant individualist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Employing a nonchronological, prismatic approach to the life and career of acclaimed British playwright Osborne, Heilpern (theater critic at the New York Observer) steps behind the curtain to find an abyss, a soul in anguish: "I feel such despair... desolation, hopelessness," Osborne wrote in his journal. Stunned by the death of his father when he was a child, the 15-year-old Osborne was expelled from school in 1943 after hitting the headmaster. In London, he was soon attracted to the theater, where he could "camouflage his own lower-class roots." While touring as an actor, he wrote four full-length plays before the collapse of his first marriage gave him the material for the autobiographical Look Back in Anger (1956), expressing such "immensity of feeling and class hatred" that it altered the course of English theater. He followed with The Entertainer in 1957 and other successes, including his 1963 Oscar-winning screenplay for Tom Jones. As Heilpern probes Osborne's caustic creativity and his volatile relationships with his wives, he layers in myriad intimate details, paralleling the playwright's life with his dramas: "Osborne dreaded loss a legacy of his father's death and loss seeps through his plays." Writing with verve and sensitivity, he skillfully interweaves a wealth of excerpts from Osborne's letters and private journals.
