The rivers of mutual affection, admiration, and artistry form a powerful confluence in these deeply affecting exchanges.
A collection of revealing and moving letters, spanning nearly 40 years, between the celebrated playwright and his publisher and friend at New Directions.
Laughlin, a poet in his own right, emerges in these pages as an exemplar of a friend. Invariably supportive, encouraging, and compassionate, the publisher was steadfast in his belief in Williams’ work—not just plays, but also poems and short stories—and his deep affection for the man. The early letters here, the majority of which are from Williams when he was young and barely known, ripple with hope and ambition. Even as early as 1942, Laughlin was writing that a script was “extremely interesting and very beautiful in places.” This sort of language continued until Williams’ death in 1983. As his career began to skyrocket (with The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire), he showed his own loyalty to Laughlin and ND by having his work published entirely with them. Later, however, we read that ND did not really have an interest in Williams’ projected memoir. His letters—even the brief ones—often contain luminescent sentences and a refreshing wryness: “The evils of promiscuity are exaggerated,” he wrote in 1945. “Of course, the primary and ultimate object is to remain alive,” he said in 1971. Occasionally, Williams offers snarky comments—e.g., about Gore Vidal—and some harsh ones for various critics, including Paul Goodman and Robert Brustein. Throughout, both Williams and Laughlin emerge as avid readers and admirers of the work of other writers, including Paul Bowles and others. The text is gracefully edited and thoughtfully and unobtrusively annotated by Fox, former president and publisher of ND, Williams’ last editor, and Laughlin’s co–literary executor; and Keith, an acting teacher and consulting editor at ND. The editors inform us about the people in Williams’ life and the specifics of the Williams productions that the letters discuss: cast members, director, critical and popular responses, etc.
The rivers of mutual affection, admiration, and artistry form a powerful confluence in these deeply affecting exchanges.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-24620-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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