Elia Kazan: A Life

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Description

Elia Kazan’s varied life and career is related here in his autobiography. He reveals his working relationships with his many collaborators, including Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean, John Steinbeck and Darryl Zanuck, and describes his directing “style” as he sees it, in relation to position, movement, pace, rhythm and his own limitations. Kazan also retraces his own decision to inform for the House Un-American Activities Committee, illuminating much of what could also be obscured in McCarthy literature.

One of the crucial important theater autobiographies of the 1980s, Elia Kazan: A Life, has in the end been released in paperback. The extra decade adds to the book’s poignancy and its value: a history of behind the curtain personalities and politics in the 20th century is included in this release. Elia Kazan used to be a founding member of the Group Theatre, used to be among those shouting “Strike! Strike!” on the legendary opening night of Waiting for Lefty, directed the two greatest Broadway dramas ever–Death of the Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire–and earned countless other credits, but he also played a fallacious role in the greatest real-life moral drama of his era: the McCarthy Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. Kazan offered names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He cut his sense of right and wrong to fit the fashion of the time, and his sense of right and wrong continues to bleed. Though this book is framed, like such a lot of Kazan’s best stage and film work, as a lifelong search for man’s proper relationship to society, the book serves as a massive explanation and apologia for Kazan’s one monumental lapse. He lived his life intensely, a life in which a single word could develop into you, where a misdeed might be “never forgotten or forgiven.” Such were the times, and Kazan captures them with appropriate drama.

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