John Lahr's stunning and complex biography of his father, the legendary actor and comedian Bert LahrNotes on a Cowardly Lion is John Lahr's masterwork: an all-encompassing biography of his father, the comedian and performer Bert Lahr. Best known as the Cowardly Lion in MGM's classic The Wizard of Oz, Lahr was a consummate artist whose career spanned burlesque, vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood. While he could be equally raucous and polished in p...

This mesmerizing story of playwright and author Joe Orton's brief and remarkable life was named book of the year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Patrick WhiteTold with precision and extensive detail, Prick Up Your Ears is the engrossing biography of playwright and novelist Joe Orton. Orton's public career spanned only three years (1964–1967), but his work made a lasting mark on the international stage. From Entertaining Mr. Sloane

**National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography CategoryNational Book Award Finalist2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre BiographyAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial AwardA Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014'USA Today: 10 Books We Loved ReadingWashington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated dram...

Hailed as a "tour de force" by the New York Times, this irresistible novel captures John Lahr's madcap geniusMeet Benny Walsh: busboy at the Homestead restaurant in New York City by day, compulsive autograph hunter by night. Known for going to extraordinary lengths for a much-coveted signature, Benny is also tangled up with an actress and fellow autograph hound named Gloria, and drawn into an embittered battle with his archenemy, a headwaiter with a grudg...

In Razzle Dazzle 'Em, John Lahr, the lead theatre critic for The New Yorker for 21 years and a multi-award-winning biographer, captures the essence of some of Hollywood's most influential actors and directors. This compelling collection of pen portraits offers a rare glimpse into the minds of those we see on screen. In this volume, Lahr's profiles of Helen Mirren, Ethan Hawke, Viola Davis, Sean Penn, Julianne Moore, Todd Haynes, Cate Blanchett, Sam Mendes, Claire Danes, J...

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 “spi...

"Lahr creates a book worthy of its title: It is a living celebration of theater itself." —Caryn James, New York Times Book ReviewSince 1992 John Lahr has written for The New Yorker, where for twenty-one years he was the senior drama critic, the longest stint in that post in the magazine's history. Joy Ride is a collection of his profiles and reviews that throws open the stage door, taking us behind the scenes both on and off Broadway to i...

A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller’s dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights“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 WeeklyDistinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915–2005), the p...

A reissue in hardback of critic John Lahr's famous 1982 study of Noël Coward's plays"Noël Coward," said Terence Rattigan, "is simply a phenomenon, and one that is unlikely to occur ever again in theatre history." A phenomenon he certainly was, and it is part of John Lahr's purpose in this book to show how that phenomenon called "Noël Coward" was largely Coward's own careful creation. Lahr's penetrating critical study of Coward's drama investigates all the major and minor plays of "The Mast...

A distinguished theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller’s dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights.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.This book, organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life—his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fasc...

The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker.John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Wi...