Home › Books › Tom Stoppard: A Life
Tom Stoppard: A Life
by
71/99
Critics
49/99
Readers
n/a
Scholars
43/99
Rating
99/99
Volume
80/99
Rating
18/99
Volume
—
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love--remain as fresh and moving today as when they dazzled their first audiences. Stoppard's life, too, is fascinating: born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Vaclav Havel. Having long described himself as a "bounced Czech," Stoppard was surprised to learn late in life of his Jewish family and the relatives he lost to the Holocaust, secrets his mother had kept from him. Hermione Lee's in-depth analysis seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful, and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man.
Preview
Reviews
"It is tempting to see 'Hermione Lee' as one of his greatest creations—a professor who knows more about a playwright who writes about professors than he knows about himself, a narrator who understands about unreliable narrators and isn't fazed by them, a reader who always gets the joke."
"Authoritative and exhaustive—another jewel in Lee's literary crown."
"Lee is a highly acclaimed biographer whose rigor and integrity make her decision to write under such conditions surprising ..."
"When I finished the Stoppard biography I was filled with sadness: Reading about his late-life discovery of his ancestry makes it impossible not to wonder what could have been, what kind of person (and writer) he would have been if he had known sooner."
"One of the achievements of her book—that of wiring the reader into Stoppard's intentions—entails a limitation."
"This is a hugely impressive work."
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!