Latest: John Lahr’s memoir These Foolish Things: A Life will be published by W.W. Norton in the U.S. in January 2027.
RAZZLE DAZZLE ‘EM
‘John Lahr’s profiles are the nearest thing we get to theatre history.
What he has is the keys to the dressing room door…’
– Sheridan Morley, The Spectator
‘These are wonderful profiles.’
– Edna O’Brien
‘One of the greatest biographers writing today.’
– The Observer
‘John Lahr managers to write about the theatre better than anybody in the English language’
– Richard Eyre
In Razzle Dazzle ‘Em, John Lahr, the lead theatre critic for The New Yorker for 21 years and a multi-award-winning biographer, captures the essence of some of Hollywood’s most influential actors and directors. This compelling collection of pen portraits offers a rare glimpse into the minds of those we see on screen. In this volume, Lahr’s profiles of Helen Mirren, Ethan Hawke, Viola Davis, Sean Penn, Julianne Moore, Todd Haynes, Cate Blanchett, Sam Mendes, Claire Danes, Judi Dench, Mike Nichols, Emma Thompson, and Al Pacino, spanning from 2000 to 2022, are brought together for the first time.
Showcasing the voices of these industry titans, Lahr masterfully explores the triumphs, challenges, and artistic processes that define the careers of these ‘show-biz legends’.
ARTHUE MILLER – AMERICAN WITNESS
‘John Lahr treats his subject with clarity and charity. His cogent analyses are revelatory but not surgical, and his sympathy never cloys. He does what a good literary biographer must do: He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges. He is an investigative reporter, a profiler of personality, mind and character, and a critic who understands drama on the page and in the house.’
– Wall Street Journal
‘New Yorker critic John Lahr shines in this searching account of the playwright Arthur Miller….It’s a great introduction to a giant of American letters.’
– Publisher’s Weekly
‘In this succinct and gorgeously written portrait, the former New Yorker critic and award-winning biographer of Tennessee Williams offers a keen psychological appraisal of Miller’s work, and Miller himself.’
– Boston Globe
Below: John Lahr and Nicholas Hytner discuss American Witness on Jewish Book Week videos.
Transcript of the discussion here.
‘No one writes about playwrights and the theater the way John Lahr does. In this probing, brilliantly insightful, and also deeply readable and entertaining book, he offers unique insight into how Miller’s mind works, and how the details of his biography impacted his body of work.’
– Sarah Ruhl, MacArthur Prizewinning playwright
‘In “Arthur Miller”, the great critic and biographer John Lahr has found a perfect subject: complex, gifted, a man of his times. This is biography-as-collaboration, and utterly captivating.’
– Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and author
‘Lahr lets us see the great American playwright with new eyes. No one writes more perceptively about the twentieth century theater than John Lahr. After his highly acclaimed Tennessee Williams biography, Lahr scores a second smash hit with “Arthur Miller”.’
– John Guare, author of Six Degrees of Separation; The House of Blue Leaves.
‘A superbly written, impeccably researched biography from the great John Lahr. The close relationship between Miller and his plays is detailed and sympathetic. A classic book about a classic American playwright.’
– André Bishop, Artistic Director, Lincoln Center Theater
John Lahr’s latest book Arthur Miller – American Witness was published by Yale University Press in November 2022
Book talk with John Lahr on American Witness.
‘Absolutely stupendous…a triumph’
Nick Hytner
John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, follows Lahr’s other ground-breaking theatre biographies to give intimate access to the mind of one of the greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century. Williams’s work ushered in – as Arthur Miller declared – ‘a revolution’ in American theatre. Williams put his best self – and most of his life – into his plays: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana among many. The plays, later made into films, defined their times and also gave defining roles to many of the century’s greatest players: Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in Street Car, Laurette Taylor as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach as Serafina and Alvaro in The Rose Tattoo, and Geraldine Page as the Princess in Sweet Bird of Youth. This brilliantly written, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Williams’s warring family, his lobotomized sister, his guilt, his plays, his turbulent homosexual life, his misreported death, even the shenanigans of his estate.
‘John Lahr’s magnificent biography…gathers material from a vast array of sources, including Williams’s diaries, poems, letters and the recollections of countless friends and colleagues,to trace how the personal and the creative lives interweave throughout the whole span of Williams’s oeuvre. The result is at once sensitive and magisterial, and it fulfils the ultimate test for a literary biography by convincing you that the works cannot be understood without it. Once you have read it, it becomes part of their meaning.’
John Carey, lead review, Sunday London Times