Full name: Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton

Author: John Lahr Year: 1978 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Biographies, Non Fiction, Play Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780520226661 9781504031479 0520226666 1504031474

John Lahr--New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer of his father Bert Lahr (Notes on a Cowardly Lion)--reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton in another extraordinary biography that was chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978. "I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stagestruck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw. Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his rightful place in the English repertoire. Similar books: Tennessee Williams by John Lahr Simone de Beauvoir by Deirdre Bair Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe Richard Burton by Melvyn Bragg Anne Morrow Lindbergh by Susan Hertog Beautiful Shadow by Andrew Wilson Soldier by Karen DeYoung Savage Art by Robert Polito The World Is What It Is by Patrick French A Lot to Ask by Hazel Holt The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane A Tragic Honesty by Blake Bailey Simenon by Pierre Assouline Anais by Noel Riley Fitch Howard Hughes by Donald L. Barlett Fosse by Sam Wasson A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro The Duck Commander Family by Willie Robertson To Selena, with Love by Chris Perez The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle by Michael J. Mooney