(Nonfiction; Knopf, 2006)
“The need still exists to believe that good art is created by good people,” writes John Heilpern early in this massive biography of the playwright John Osborne. When Heilpern was first approached to write the authorized biography of the man whose 1956 play Look Back in Anger turned English theater on its head and took genteel, morose postwar London by storm, Heilpern thought to turn the offer down. Osborne, who died in 1994, was a legendary creep: vicious, womanizing, misogynist, self-pitying.
