Elia Kazan: A Biography - Tapa blanda

"Breathtaking, often riotous but never excessive...[Elia Kazan] could not be a more pertinent study of a spellbinding subject." -- New York Times Book Review "A scintillating and thoroughly readable new biography." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution "This sympathetic, scrupulously researched biography...vividly conveys the director's potent personality..." -- Booklist (starred review) "[A] masterly meditation on a complex, conflicted, and underappreciated director... One of the year's best biographies." -- Library Journal "Schickel has a razor-sharp understanding of the many ways in which his subject's life and work affected one another." -- Martin Scorsese "A worthy companion to the director's own autobiography...immensely likeable." -- The Economist "A splendid, subtle, literate biography of one of the grand creative artists of theater and film in our time." -- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "This analysis is unsparingly thorough...Schickel's forceful, personalized criticism becomes as attention grabbing as Kazan's body of work." -- Publishers Weekly "Richard Schickel has produced the first 'life' of Kazan...[with] an impressive knowledge of the terrain [and] soundly balanced judgments." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review "...contains not a single dull moment for those interested in the behind-the-scenes aspects of theater and movies..." -- New York Press "Outstanding...Perhaps, thanks to Schickel's biography, history will once again remember Kazan primarily for his accomplishments, not his testimony." -- Grand Rapids Press "One of those exhilarating publishing rarities -- the ideal writer for the ideal subject." -- Buffalo News "Theater and film buffs -- not to mention scholars -- will revel in this astute explication of a working life." -- New York Sun

This is an electrifying biography, by one of America's foremost film scholars, of the controversial director Elia Kazan (1909-2003), that looks at the man and his art in the context of the social, political, and cultural environments in which he lived and worked. From the late forties through the sixties, Elia Kazan was the most important and influential director in America, and the only one who managed simultaneously to dominate both theater and film. In that role, he manifestly shaped the conception and writing, as well as the presentation, of many of the period's iconic works, reshaping the values of the stage and bringing a new realism and intensity of performance to the screen. His various achievements include the original Broadway productions of "All My Sons", "A Streetcar Named Desire", and "Death of a Salesman" and such Hollywood films as "Brando's Streetcar", "On the Waterfront", "East of Eden", and "Splendor in the Grass". These enormously popular works, in turn, shaped the social, sexual, and political ideas of a generation. The result is an intelligent and lively biography and social history.