John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man Book

John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, shocked and transformed British theater in the 1950s with his play Look Back in Anger. This startling biography–the first to draw on the secret notebooks in which he recorded his anguish and depression–reveals the notorious rebel in all his heartrending complexity.

Through a working-class childhood and five marriages, Osborne led a tumultuous life. An impossible father, he threw his teenage daughter out of the house and never spoke to her again. His last written words were "I have sinned." Theater critic John Heilpern’s detailed portrait, including interviews with Osborne's daughter, scores of friends and enemies, and his alleged male lover, shows us a contradictory genius–an ogre with charm, a radical who hated change, and above all, a defiant individualist.

The New Yorker

This biography provides a nuanced portrait of a playwright whose unbridled life—five wives, countless feuds—is the stuff of easy caricature. Heilpern draws on Osborne’s bleak private notebooks to generate acute readings of his often autobiographical plays. Sympathy for the man and admiration for the work don’t blind Heilpern to his subject’s outsized flaws. Osborne had a talent for invective and could be cruelly intolerant in matters large and small. He threatened theatre critics with physical violence by way of anonymous seaside postcards. Stung by his teen-age daughter’s indifference to high culture, he damned her as “criminally commonplace” and never spoke to her again. Without excusing such “breathtaking abuse,” Heilpern makes a compelling case for Osborne as a necessary “truth-teller” and “unyielding advocate of individualism in conformist times.”