Books about Playwright from Amazon.com

4 plays about an existential portrayal of Hell, the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict and an arresting attack on American racism..
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For many years, Lajos Egri's highly opinionated but very enjoyable The Art of Dramatic Writing has been a well-guarded secret of playwrights, scriptwriters, and writers for television Unlike many other books on playwrighting (several of which Egri criticizes during the course of this one), the author's systematic breakdown of the essentials for creating successful realistic plays and screenplays effectively demystifies the process of creative writing. Egri, who formulated his thoughts about "a well-made play" during its heyday (the 1940s and '50s), places a premium on an exhaustive analysis of characters and discussion of their psychological motivations. The writer is exhorted to find a premise to explore and to discover which characters will most effectively demonstrate this thesis, then is shown how most effectively to place them into conflict with each other. Conflict itself is also discussed, particularly how to create scenarios in which the crisis develops at a pace that feels unforced and natural. While Egri's view of the well-made play has little space for either the spare musings of Beckett and Pinter or the conscious excesses of non-narrative and other experimental writing, it nonetheless remains an essential text for writers drawn to realistic drama, and to any writer interested in the fundamental motivations of human behavior. --John Longenbaugh.
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Aristotle called "Oedipus The King," the second-written of the three Theban plays written by Sophocles, the masterpiece of the whole of Greek theater Today, nearly 2,500 years after Sophocles wrote, scholars and audiences still consider it one of the most powerful dramatic works ever made. Freud sure did. The three plays--"Antigone," "Oedipus the King," and "Oedipus at Colonus"--are not strictly a trilogy, but all are based on the Theban myths that were old even in Sophocles' time. This particular edition was rendered by Robert Fagles, perhaps the best translator of the Greek classics into English..
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In the tradition of Quirk's bestselling Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents (100,000+ copies in print), here are outrageous and uncensored profiles of the world's greatest writers, complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright bizarre facts. Consider:

Edgar Allan Poe was kicked out of West Point Military Academy.
Louisa May Alcott was addicted to opium.
W. B. Yeats paid surgeons to transplant monkey glands into his scrotum.
J. R. R. Tolkien slept in his bathroom.
Kurt Vonnegut managed a Saab dealership before hitting the big time.

With chapters on everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your teachers were afraid to answer: What's the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? Why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie's Angels? The classics were never this much fun in school!.
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Aristophanes' comic plays, Lysistrata, Women at the Thesmophoria and Assemblywomen contain the earliest portrayals of actual women in the European literary tradition, and are the only such portrayals that survive from classical Athens. These plays provide a unique glimpse of women not only in their familiar domestic roles but also in relation to household and city religion and government, war and peace, theater and festival, and, of course, to men. In all three plays we find a fantastic but provocatively plausible inversion of the actual world, where women and men have changed places. Aristophanes' comic gynecocracies put male fantasies of feminism--often intersecting with those of myth, tragedy and Platonic idealism--into sharp and memorable focus, and so help us to redefine our understanding of the troubling realities to which these comic fantasies were a response.

In Staging Women the eminent Aristophanic scholar Jeffrey Henderson presents, for the first time in a single volume, all three plays in new translations. Unlike earlier versions, which typically censor, translate around, or otherwise misrepresent these texts, Henderson preserves intact all of Aristophanes' blunt and often obscene language, rough satire, social and political protest and provocative fantasy. In addition, each play is supplied with an introduction and explanatory notes. The volume includes introductory material about Aristophanes, his comic theater and the women in Aristophanic comedy. An appendix contains translations of fragments bearing on the portrayal of women in Aristophanes'lost plays..
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In addition to the morality play, Everyman, this volume contains a selection of fifteenth century biblical pageants: the very best from the cycles of York, Chester, Wakefield, Coventry and "N. town." A translation of the Cornish Death of Pilate rounds out this fascinating collection for admirers of theatre and of medieval literature..
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