Few playwrights write as much of their lives into every work as did Tennessee Williams, and few had lives that were so obviously theatrical. Growing up amid abusive alcoholism, genteel posturing, and the incipient madness of his beloved sister, Rose, Williams produced plays in which violence exploded into rape, castration, and even cannibalism, projecting dramatic personal traumas. In this frank, compelling study, the distinguished biographer and critic Ronald Hayman explores the intersection of biography and art in one of the most exuberantly autobiographical dramatists of the American theater. By the time he died, in 1983, Williams's reputation had seriously declined. More than twenty years of drug and alcohol addiction, coupled with devastating openness about his promiscuous homosexuality, had all but destroyed one of America's greatest playwrights, while Williams's new works were increasingly unsuccessful. In recent years, however, Broadway revivals and amateur productions have testified to his enduring greatness as one of the shapers of the American theater. The major plays, such as The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, never disappeared from American theatrical consciousness. Their heroes - Tom Wingfield, Brick Pollitt, even Blanche Du Bois - are portraits of the artist as a very troubled man. Hayman explores the life and writings of Tennessee Williams and shows how they were linked. More than any previous biographer, he unmasks the compulsive, driven man behind the characters and lays bare the pain that engendered Williams's violent apocalypses. Tennessee Williams will change the way lovers of drama experience and understand some of its finestachievements.

In a ramshackle theatre, August Strindberg directs two actors in an autobiographical play detailing his difficult, stormy relationship with his first wife. This drama about a sensitive, driven, turbulent and mystical playwright uses a fictional play-within-a-play device to create the environment within which its director/subject - Strindburg - works out his relationships with his lovers and his cast. "Playing the Wife" was first presented at the Chichester Festival in 1995, with Derek Jacobi as Strindburg.

How to Read a Play is an introductory guide to the art of translating the printed page of a play or screenplay into dramatic mental images; it has been a classic among actors, directors, and writers for the past twenty years. Now fully updated and revised, the books devotes a chapter exclusively to screenplays, noting the intrinsic differences between a screenplay and a playscript and thus bringing this invaluable classic up to date.

How should we read stage directions? How can we imagine the theatrical impact of a sound effect? Of silence? What about the effect of colors, costumes, groupings, relative positions on the stage? Are characters sometimes saying something different from what their words say? In the course of answering these and many more questions, Hayman talks about the use of space, momentum, and suspense, the silence under the words, identity and character, irony and ambiguity, meaning and experience -- in short, all the elements that give life to the printed page as much as a musical performance does to a printed score. How to Read a Play is an essential guidebook to the art of drama.

Envious contemporaries of Nietzsche ridiculed him as a mad man - and yet they came closer than they knew in characterising a philosopher in whose thought ambivalence approximated to disintegration of the self.

While the nineteenth century's coherent, consistent systems of certainty came crashing down ingloriously at the very first touch of the twentieth, Nietzsche's discourses survived. He was more modern, it seemed, than the moderns.

In this stimulating and provocative guide, Hayman reveals how Nietzsche's work is more contemporary and relevant than ever in a new postmodern age.

"[M]eticulously researched...judicious....intelligently illuminates the private life Jung deliberately veiled in shadow."—New York Times Book Review

Carl Jung was one of the world's most influential psychoanalysts. With the exception of Freud, who chose him as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, no psychologist has achieved more. Previous biographers have either made Jung an idol or condemned him for his failings. Ronald Hayman neither ignores Jung's faults nor exaggerates them in investigating the most crucial paradoxes surrounding this enigmatic figure. Hailed by Anthony Storr as "the best biography of Jung," Hayman's work is "all the more effective for its detached tone that perfectly puts in proportion Jung's cruel, brilliant and crazy schemes" (The Times [London]). Impeccably researched and written with notable objectivity, A Life of Jung offers a rare insight into how Jung's revolutionary ideas grew out of his own extraordinary experiences. 16 pages of illustrations.

"Compelling....Hayman captures...the extraordinary charisma of his subject."—Newsday

"Likely to become the standard biography of the revolutionary psychoanalyst."—Kirkus Reviews starred review

The Gates of Summer is a comedy set in and about a country house in Greece immediately before the First World War. The Devils was commissioned by Sir Peter Hall and produced at the Aldwych in 1961 with Dorothy Tutin and Diana Rigg. Marching Song and A Walk in the Desert were both adapted for television.

Thomas Mann, author of "Death in Venice", "The Magic Mountain", and "Buddenbrooks" was a man with secrets. This biography offers a portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, drawing on Mann's unexpurgated diaries. It uncovers a brilliant writer's mask to reveal the private man: his bisexuality, his obsession with preserving appearances and the deep guilt which plagued him for nearly fifty years. The sanitized self-image Mann strove to maintain is revealed as a fragile veneer. Drawing on the diaries that he stipulated should remain under seal for twenty years after his death, and on interviews with Mann's children, the author depicts a man subject to nervous trembling, convulsive sobbing and moments of sexual embarrassment. When his novels are reread from this perspective, new meanings emerge and interconnections between the problems of the author and his characters become apparent. As Mann wrote to a friend, he devised "novelistic forms and masks which can be displayed in public as a means of relaying my love, my hatred, my sympathy, my contempt, my pride, my scorn and the accusations I want to make". Ronald Hayman is the biographer of Proust, Sartre, Kafka, Nietzche, Brecht and Sylvia Plath.