The Orton diaries : including the correspondence of Edna Welthorpe and others
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The Orton diaries : including the correspondence of Edna Welthorpe and others
Da Capo Press, 1996, c1986
1st Da Capo Press ed
Available at 2 libraries
Note
Includes index
Originally published: London : Methuen, 1986
Description and Table of Contents
Description
"To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature." When Joe Orton (1933-1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was being hailed as the greatest comic playwright since Oscar Wilde for his darkly hilarious Entertaining Mr. Sloane and the farce hit Loot , and was completing What the Butler Saw but less than three months later, his longtime companion, Kenneth Halliwell, smashed in Orton's skull with a hammer before killing himself. The Orton Diaries , written during his last eight months, chronicle in a remarkably candid style his outrageously unfettered life: his literary success, capped by an Evening Standard Award and overtures from the Beatles his sexual escapades,at his mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and, extensively, in Tangiers and the breakdown of his sixteen-year "marriage" to Halliwell, the relationship that transformed and destroyed him. Edited with a superb introduction by John Lahr, The Orton Diaries is his crowning achievement.
Table of Contents
The Diaries * London December 1966May 1967 * Tangier MayJune 1967 * LondonAugust 1967 Appendices * The Edna Welthorpe Letters * Chronology * List of Published Work
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