Chaucer and His England Book

Osborne exemplified a generation of dramatists who detonated the understated drawing-room dramas of Terrence Rattigan and Noel Coward, which dominated the West End in the years before and after WW II. He exploded onto the London stage in 1957 with Look Back in Anger. Featuring overstatements, long speeches, and strident anti-class-structure themes, the play shocked audiences, critics, and fellow playwrights. Of 12 opening-night critics, only two saw the breakthrough that Look Back in Anger represented (a television broadcast of an excerpt from the play soon brought Osborne to the attention of the younger audience he sought). Two other masterpieces, The Entertainer and Inadmissible Evidence, followed in the next several years. Heilpern writes with enviable ease and wit, explaining how he came to write Osborne's authorized biography: he met casually with the playwright long before a biography was in the offing and after Osborne's death got to know his wife, who gave him complete access to her husband's papers. Osborne emerges from this vivid, masterful biography as a giant of modern literature.