A Life

“This is the best autobiography I’ve read by a prominent American in I don’t

know how many years. It is endlessly absorbing and I believe this is because

it concerns a man who is looking to find a coherent philosophy that will be

tough enough to contain all that is ugly in his person and his experience, yet

shall prove sufficiently compassionate to give honest judgment on himself and

others. Somehow, the author brings this off. _Elia Kazan: A Life_ has that

candor of confession which is possible only when the deepest wounds have

healed and honesty can achieve what honesty so rarely arrives at—a rich and

hearty flavor. By such means, a famous director has written a book that offers

the kind of human wealth we find in a major novel.”    —Norman Mailer

In this amazing autobiography, Kazan at seventy-eight brings to the undiluted

telling of his story—and revelation of himself—all the passion, vitality, and

truth, the almost outrageous honesty, that have made him so formidable a stage

director ( _A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, Cat on

a Hot Tin Roof, Tea and Sympathy_ ), film director ( _On the Waterfront, East

of Eden, Gentleman’s Agreement, Splendor in the Grass, Baby Doll, The Last

Tycoon, A Face in the Crowd_ ), and novelist (the number-one best-seller _The

Arrangement_.)

Kazan gives us his sense of himself as an outsider (a Greek rug merchant’s son

born in Turkey, an immigrant’s son raised in New York and educated at Williams

College). He takes us into the almost accidental sojourn at the Yale Drama

School that triggered his commitment to theatre, and his edgy, exciting

apprenticeship with the new and astonishing Group Theatre, as stagehand and

stage manager—and as actor ( _Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy_ ) . . . his first

nervous and then successful attempts at directing for theatre and movies (

_The Skin of Our Teeth, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_ ) . . . his return to New

York to co-found the Actors Studio (and his long and ambivalent relationship

with Lee Strasberg) . . . his emergence as premier director on both coasts.

With his director’s eye for the telling scene, Kazan shares the joys and

complications of production, his unique insights on acting, directing, and

producing. He makes us feel the close presence of the actors, producers, and

writers he’s worked with—James Dean, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Vivien

Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Sam Spiegel, Darryl Zanuck, Harold Clurman, Arthur

Miller, Budd Schulberg, James Baldwin, Clifford Odets, and John Steinbeck

among them. He gives us a frank and affectionate portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

He talks with startling candor about himself as husband and—in the years where

he obsessively sought adventure outside marriage—as lover. For the first time,

he discusses his Communist Party years and his wrenching decision in 1952 to

be a cooperative witness before HUAC. He writes about his birth as a writer.

The pace and organic drama of his narrative, his grasp of the life and

politics of Broadway and Hollywood, the keenness with which he observes the

men and women and worlds around him, and, above all, the honest with which he

pursues and captures his own essence, make this one of the most fascinating

autobiographies of our time.