Book - BookDetective

Name: The Orton Diaries

Authors: Joe Orton, John Lahr
Year: 1986
Rank:

Rating:

Original Rating:

Pop Rating:

Genres/categories:
Biographies, Non Fiction, Gay & Lesbian, Memoirs

Purchase/reserch links:

LibraryThing

Goodreads

Amazon

ISBNs:
9780306807336
9780060157432
0306807335
0060157437

"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.