The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan Hardcover - 2014

Media reviews

“Fascinating . . . These letters show Kazan creating a blueprint for the kind of work he believed was important and going on to succeed beyond his wildest expectations . . . They show his many strategies for getting exactly what he wanted; for someone who turned his scorn for Hollywood into a running refrain, he was a sharp businessman who knew how to negotiate canny business deals. They illustrate his analyses of a play or a screenplay’s flaws in ways meant to improve it, especially when trying to translate his thoughts into language any actor could follow . . . Vibrant . . . Essential . . . A valuable contribution to theater history.”  —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“These vibrant, muscular, outspoken, take-no-prisoners letters tell you everything you will ever need to know about the theater, relationships between artists, Hollywood illusions, affairs of the heart, family. Kazan had an amazing life and a brilliant career, and he wrote with eloquence, passion, and truth. These letters are to be treasured.”
—André Bishop, Producing Artistic Director, Lincoln Center Theater

“Elia Kazan lived, directed, and wrote from his gut. He was a powerhouse. His scrupulously edited Selected Letters carries the same unflinching, instinctive, brilliant wallop: vividly alive, self-aware, fervent, resourceful—they exude the pulse of a man fighting for his identity and for his place in American theater. The letters cover his struggles with the Group Theatre and Actors Studio, with his collaborators (Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, Marlon Brando, Thornton Wilder, Clifford Odets, among many), and with himself and his family. They are incandescent witness to the century he so fiercely bustled in. Taken together with Kazan's memoir, A Life, the volumes are among the essential documents of twentieth-century American theater.”
—John Lahr

“Elia Kazan’s letters crackle with the impulsive exuberance of a vital, brilliant, ambitious  man wholly devoted to craft. And they tell the not-to-be-missed story of American politics and American art, deeply entwined, during the fatally conflicted era that is our inheritance.”
—Brenda Wineapple
 
“Engrossing . . . An impressive work of scholarship, this collection offers a sweeping look at sixty years of American popular culture and an intimate portrait of one complex man whirling at its center.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Compulsively readable . . . Few entertainment figures had the particular combination of passion, feistiness, diligence, and longevity that made Kazan such a prodigious letter writer. The Selected Letters is a history of the golden age of Broadway and Hollywood as seen through the eyes of a man who irrevocably transformed both industries, even as he ran afoul of them by naming names in the McCarthy hearings of 1952. It charts Kazan’s long, rocky friendship with Tennessee Williams, his beefs with Clifford Odets and John Steinbeck, his battles with the censors over A Streetcar Named Desire and with Marlon Brando over On the Waterfront, all the while displaying an artistic integrity and social consciousness so rare in film today.”
—Julian Sancton, Departures