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____________________‘A superbly edited and evocatively illustrated collection that brings together everything that Scott wrote to his wife' - Sunday Telegraph'Heartbreaking ... Love has seldom seemed more poignant' - Sunday Times'Excellent ... the correspondence speaks for itself and the editors allow readers to draw their own conclusions' - Daily Telegraph____________________Through his alcoholism and her mental illness, his career highs (and lows) and her institutional confinement, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's devotion to each other endured for more than twenty-two years. Now, for the first time, the story of the love of these two glamorous and hugely talented writers can be given in their own letters. Introduced by an extensive narrative of the Fitzgeralds' marriage, the 333 letters - three-quarters of them previously unpublished or out of print - have been edited by the noted Fitzgerald scholars, Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks. They are illustrated throughout with a generous selection of familiar and unpublished photographs.

William Inge's popular plays of the 1950s received Tony nominations (Bus Stop, 1956, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, 1958) and won a Pulitzer Prize (Picnic, 1953). As a screenwriter, he won an Academy Award (Splendor in the Grass, 1961). Yet Inge's career ended in perceived failure, depression and finally suicide. These previously unpublished essays take a fresh look at some of his most popular work, as well as his less well-known later plays. Inge's work was often ahead of its time, and foreshadowed the influence of popular media and advertising, the sexual revolution and the women's movement. The essays give context for Inge's work within 20th-century American drama, and attest to his exceptional talent. Included are reminiscences which reveal the playwright's charm and generosity, and shed light on how a brilliant, troubled man eventually took his own life.

The essays in Thornton Wilder: New Perspectives constitute a comprehensive critical reassessment at a time of renewed interest in the writer. Wilder is best known for Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, both winners of a Pulitzer Prize, making Wilder still the only writer to be so honored for both drama and fiction. His other fiction, in particular, is far less familiar to a wider readership. The authors of these essays aim to contextualize Wilder’s work historically and to show that Wilder’s handling of questions of religion, American identity, gender, and ethics should vault him into the ranks of major American novelists. Specifically, this anthology includes groundbreaking work on the application of queer theory to Our Town; on Wilder’s screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt; and on Wilder’s adaptations of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, and his own The Long Christmas Dinner.

Musical theater has captivated American audiences from its early roots in burlesque stage productions and minstrel shows to the million-dollar industry it has become on Broadway today. What is it about this truly indigenous American art form that has made it so enduringly popular? How has it survived, even thrived, alongside the technology of film and the glitz and glamour of Hollywood? Will it continue to evolve and leave its mark on the twenty-first century?Bringing together exclusive and previously unpublished interviews with nineteen leading composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, choreographers, and producers from the mid-1900s to the present, this book details the careers of the individuals who shaped this popular performance art during its most prolific period. The interviewees discuss their roles in productions ranging from On the Town (1944) and Finian's Rainbow (1947) to The Producers (2001) and Bounce (2003).Readers are taken onto the stage, into the rehearsals, and behind the scenes. The nuts and bolts, the alchemy, and the occasional agonies of the collaborative process are all explored. In their discussions, the artists detail their engagements with other creative forces, including such major talents as Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, Zero Mostel, and Gwen Verdon. They speak candidly about their own work and that of their peers, their successes and failures, the creative process, and how a show progresses from its conception through rehearsals and tryouts to opening night.Taken together, these interviews give fresh insight into what Oscar Hammerstein called "a nightly miracle"-the creation of the American musical.

Years after his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald continues to captivate both the popular and the critical imagination. This collection of essays presents fresh insights into his writing, discussing neglected texts and approaching familiar works from new perspectives.Seventeen scholarly articles deal not only with Fitzgerald's novels but with his stories and essays as well, considering such topics as the Roman Catholic background of The Beautiful and Damned and the influence of Mark Twain on Fitzgerald's work and self-conception. The volume also features four personal essays by Fitzgerald's friends Budd Schulberg, Frances Kroll Ring, publisher Charles Scribner III, and writer George Garrett that shed new light on his personal and professional lives. Together these contributions demonstrate the continued vitality of Fitzgerald's work and establish new directions for ongoing discussions of his life and writing.

This volume includes twenty-six conversations with Lillian Hellman, ranging from early newspaper interviews on the occasions of the Broadway openings of her plays through extended talks with her which appears in the Paris Review, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, down to her last interviews in the early 1980s.In all these interviews, Miss Hellman gives her own account of her eventful and exciting life, her evaluations and analyses of her plays and accounts of how and why they came to be written. Throughout, her views are expressed with the pungency, directness, honesty, and wit which made Lillian Hellman such a universally admired and respected figure.Hellman was seldom far from where the action was. The controversies in which she was involved are equaled only by the honors she received. This volume supplements her own memories by providing her own account of her life as she lived it--rather than from the vantage of the late 1960s and 1970s when she composed the memoirs.

Known today primarily as the author of Our Town, probably America's most beloved and widely produced play, Thornton Wilder is the only writer ever to be honored with Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama. This collection of interviews with Wilder covers the full range of his sixty-year career as one of America's leading men of letters. In addition to American interviews, this book includes translations of interviews published originally in French and German that have never appeared in English previously. It includes a transcription of a rare radio interview conducted by Rex Stout and an extensive Paris Review conversation between Wilder and Richard H. Goldston, his first biographer. Throughout this book is a sense of Wilder's boundless curiosity, his wit, his unflagging energy, his friendships with a range of celebrities such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Gene Tunney, and above all, the multitude of subjects on which he conversed easily and brilliantly. Conversations with Thornton Wilder provides a close-up encounter with Wilder as novelist, playwright, actor, director, teacher, scholar, world traveler, musician, raconteur, and friend of the famous. The earliest interview included was given in 1928, when his most acclaimed and commercially successful novel, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, won him his first Pulitzer Prize. From the 1930s and 1940s come Wilder's comments on his two celebrated plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, both Pulitzer winners. In the last three decades of his life, Wilder returned to the novel form (The Eighth Day won the National Book Award) while continuing to write plays and to give his opinions on theater-in-the-round, the hippie movement, movies and television, and Communism.

Neil Simon (1927–2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day—including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis—and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays—some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious Subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon’s genius.

Neil Simon (1927–2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day—including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis—and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays—some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious Subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon’s genius.

A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics.The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics.The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian.Henley is a master at writing about the duality of human experience—the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks in the most recent interview, is "such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.

With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian.Henley is a master at writing about the duality of human experience—the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks in the most recent interview, is "such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.

Timothy Findley (1930–2002) became one of Canada’s most beloved and honored writers during the last four decades of the twentieth century. Because of their controversial subjects and unconventional style, his first two novels, The Last of the Crazy People (1967) and The Butterfly Plague (1969), were initially published only in Great Britain and the United States. Success in his native country finally arrived in 1977 with the publication of his novel The Wars, which won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and is considered a Canadian classic and an iconic portrayal of World War I. He went on to publish seven novels, a novella, three collections of short stories, four plays, and three works of nonfiction, as well as numerous screenplays, TV scripts, and essays, reviews, and opinion pieces in periodicals. His play, Elizabeth Rex (2000), won the Governor General’s Award for Drama. In addition, he was appointed an Officer in the Order of Canada, which is the highest honor a Canadian civilian can receive, in 1986; was named to France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996; and received seven honorary degrees. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, he was a leading public intellectual who often effectively criticized censorship and the destruction of the environment. The interviews collected here, which span three decades, offer candid, extensive, intimate, often amusing, and sometimes provocative commentary on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to his life and works; his love of nature and of animals, his homosexuality and alcoholism; politics in Canada and the US, and Canadian literature. Timothy Findley began his creative life as an actor, and in many ways, he often seemed to regard interviews as performances which he relished—notably, most were in a Q&A format, which he preferred and are thus true "conversations"—and his enjoyment of them is fully apparent in the pages of this collection.

Timothy Findley (1930–2002) became one of Canada’s most beloved and honored writers during the last four decades of the twentieth century. Because of their controversial subjects and unconventional style, his first two novels, The Last of the Crazy People (1967) and The Butterfly Plague (1969), were initially published only in Great Britain and the United States. Success in his native country finally arrived in 1977 with the publication of his novel The Wars, which won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and is considered a Canadian classic and an iconic portrayal of World War I. He went on to publish seven novels, a novella, three collections of short stories, four plays, and three works of nonfiction, as well as numerous screenplays, TV scripts, and essays, reviews, and opinion pieces in periodicals. His play, Elizabeth Rex (2000), won the Governor General’s Award for Drama. In addition, he was appointed an Officer in the Order of Canada, which is the highest honor a Canadian civilian can receive, in 1986; was named to France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996; and received seven honorary degrees. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, he was a leading public intellectual who often effectively criticized censorship and the destruction of the environment. The interviews collected here, which span three decades, offer candid, extensive, intimate, often amusing, and sometimes provocative commentary on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to his life and works; his love of nature and of animals, his homosexuality and alcoholism; politics in Canada and the US, and Canadian literature. Timothy Findley began his creative life as an actor, and in many ways, he often seemed to regard interviews as performances which he relished—notably, most were in a Q&A format, which he preferred and are thus true "conversations"—and his enjoyment of them is fully apparent in the pages of this collection.

In little more than twenty years, playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) completed a ten-play cycle depicting African American life in the twentieth century, with each play taking place in a different decade. Two of the plays—Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990)—were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and seven of them received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best American play. Wilson was indisputably the most significant American playwright to emerge since Edward Albee. Conversations with August Wilson collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his ""four B's""—the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards. Throughout, Wilson is candid, expansive, and provocative, displaying in these exchanges his willingness to confront controversial topics just as he did in his plays. Jackson R. Bryer is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. Mary C. Hartig teaches English at Montgomery College and is the coeditor, with Jackson R. Bryer, of Facts on File Companion to American Drama.

"Who is this Gatsby anyhow?" Answering that question, voiced by one of the book's characters, is fundamental to teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Although there is no simple answer, classroom analysis of this classic American novel can lead to a rich exploration of the colorful yet contradictory period Fitzgerald dubbed the Jazz Age. The novel also prompts considerations of novelistic technique, specifically point of view, characterization, and narrative structure.This volume aims to give instructors of The Great Gatsby multiple tools and strategies for teaching the novel and for introducing students to the culture of the 1920s. Part 1, "Materials," reviews the novel's composition history and the scholarly resources related to the novel. In part 2, "Approaches," contributors demonstrate a range of frameworks that usefully inform teaching, from the new historicism to feminist and gender studies to narrative theory. They also examine the novel's complex artistry, variety of motifs and symbol patterns, and cultural and social influences, such as the era's changing racial attitudes, the rise of a new suburban culture, and the dichotomy of East versus West in America.

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read, or re-read, the stories selected.On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values.Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger, Malamud and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected.Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer and Mako Yoshikawa.

Personal reminiscences of Fitzgerald - many previously unpublished - by those who knew him, allowing the reader to construct a composite biography.Fitzgerald once wrote: "There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good." Since his untimely death in 1940, Fitzgerald has been scrutinized in nine major biographies, each of which seeks to construct a single narrative that conveys the biographer's interpretation of Fitzgerald. In contrast, F. Scott Fitzgerald Remembered presents over sixty first-hand accounts of Fitzgerald, many of them previously unpublished, by those who knew him at all stages of his life - from his time as an adolescent in St. Paul and an undergraduate at Princeton through his meeting and marrying Zelda Sayre and his first successes, the high points and increasing dissipation of the 1920s in New York, Paris, and the Riviera and the 1930s in Baltimore and North Carolina, to his final years in Hollywood. The guiding principle is not to provide a single interpretation of Fitzgerald's life but to present these accounts in all their variety and even contradiction, inviting the reader to form a biographical portrait based upon them. Making these reminiscences available to scholars, students, and fans of Fitzgerald is particularly timely given the centenary of the publication of The Great Gatsby in 2025.

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read, or re-read, the stories selected.On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values.Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger, Malamud and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected.Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer and Mako Yoshikawa.