By Elia Kazan

"This is the simplest autobiography I've learn through a fashionable American in I don't know the way a long time. it's without end soaking up and that i think for the reason that it matters a guy who's trying to discover a coherent philosophy that would be difficult adequate to include all that's gruesome in his individual and his adventure, but shall end up sufficiently compassionate to offer sincere judgment on himself and others. by some means, the writer brings this off. Elia Kazan: A lifestyles has that candor of confession that is attainable purely whilst the private wounds have healed and honesty can in attaining what honesty so hardly ever arrives at--a wealthy and hearty taste. via such capability, a recognized director has written a ebook that gives the type of human wealth we discover in an incredible novel." --Norman Mailer

during this notable autobiography, Kazan at seventy-eight brings to the undiluted telling of his story--and revelation of himself--all the fervour, power, and fact, the virtually outrageous honesty, that experience made him so ambitious a degree director (A Streetcar Named wish, demise of a salesperson, All My Sons, Cat on a scorching Tin Roof, Tea and Sympathy), movie director (On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Gentleman's contract, attractiveness within the Grass, child Doll, The final rich person, A Face within the Crowd), and novelist (the number-one best-seller The Arrangement.)

Kazan provides us his experience of himself as an intruder (a Greek rug merchant's son born in Turkey, an immigrant's son raised in manhattan and informed at Williams College). he's taking us into the virtually unintended sojourn on the Yale Drama tuition that caused his dedication to theatre, and his edgy, interesting apprenticeship with the recent and wonderful team Theatre, as stagehand and degree manager--and as actor (Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy) . . . his first apprehensive after which winning makes an attempt at directing for theatre and flicks (The epidermis of Our the teeth, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) . . . his go back to big apple to co-found the Actors Studio (and his lengthy and ambivalent dating with Lee Strasberg) . . . his emergence as preferable director on either coasts.

With his director's eye for the telling scene, Kazan stocks the thrill and problems of creation, his exact insights on appearing, directing, and generating. He makes us believe the shut presence of the actors, manufacturers, and writers he's labored with--James Dean, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Vivien Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Sam Spiegel, Darryl Zanuck, Harold Clurman, Arthur Miller, Budd Schulberg, James Baldwin, Clifford Odets, and John Steinbeck between them. He provides us a frank and affectionate portrait of Marilyn Monroe. He talks with startling candor approximately himself as husband and--in the years the place he obsessively sought experience outdoors marriage--as lover. For the 1st time, he discusses his Communist occasion years and his wrenching choice in 1952 to be a cooperative witness prior to HUAC. He writes approximately his delivery as a writer.

The velocity and natural drama of his narrative, his grab of the lifestyles and politics of Broadway and Hollywood, the zeal with which he observes the boys and ladies and worlds round him, and, certainly, the sincere with which he pursues and captures his personal essence, make this some of the most interesting autobiographies of our time.