The Dramatic Story that Capitvated a Generation
With this new edition, the classic best-selling autobiography by the late playwright Moss Hart returns to print in the thirtieth anniversary of its original publication. Issued in tandem with Kitty, the revealing autobiography of his wife, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Act One, is a landmark memoir that incluenced a generation of theatergoers, dramatists, and general book readers everywhere. The book eloquently chronicles Moss Hart's impoverished childhood in the Bronx and Brooklyn and his long, determined struggle to his first theatreical Broadway success, Once in a Lifetime. One of the most celebrated American theater books of the twentieth centure and a glorious memorial to a bygone age, Act One if filled with all the wonder, drama, and heartbreak that surrounded Broadway in the 1920s and the years before World War II.

Act One: An Autobiography

Biographies & Memoirs

Hart, Moss

Arts & Literature

St. Martin's: Griffin

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Hodder&Stoughton Ltd

"ACT ONE" is the best book written about the panic and glare of Broadway.

Act One

Ballantine Books

In the opinion of the publishers, act one is the warmest, most engrossing—and by far the most revealing—book about the theatre that they have ever encountered. It is, of course, a success story, for Moss Hart today is one of the most brilliant, successful and famous figures in the American theatre, both as a playwright and as a director. How did it happen? Not easily. His boyhood and adolescent years were spent in two entirely different backgrounds, and the stories of both are fascinating. With the opening of his first Broadway play, Once in a Lifetime, his world changed abruptly. This book concludes with a detailed telling of the complicated steps whereby that play came into being. “I consider the memories and pledges that were part of the struggle that preceded success the vital ones,” the author says. He has set these memories down with unusual candor, humor and excitement; and the book is an intimate and informative portrait, not only of him self but of the world of the theatre as well.

Act One: An Autobiography by Moss Hart

Humor & Entertainment

Random House]

Vintage

Act One (Vintage Signet, T1849)

New American Library

Signet

Merrily We Roll Along, although praised by critics, was a failure on Broadway in 1934 but has since garnered almost cult classic status. It concerns a man who has lost the idealistic values of his youth. Its innovative structure presents the story in reverse order, with the character regressing from a mournful adult to a young man whose future is filled with promise.

Merrily We Roll Along

Kaufman, George S.

Blurb

Three American theater classics by two of our most revered playwrights. "Once in a Lifetime" is a highly charged satire about three small-time vaudevillians who set out for Hollywood. There, their wild luck, the incompetence of the producers, and the haywire atmosphere of the burgeoning film industry conspire to their great success. The 1936 Pulitzer Prize winner "You Can’t Take It With You" is the tale of a zany but lovable family of hobby-horse enthusiasts. For thirty-five years Grandpa has done nothing but hunt snakes, throw darts, and avoid income-tax payments; his son-in-law makes fireworks in the basement, and other assorted family members write plays, operate amateur printing presses, and play the xylophone. They live in delightfully comic eccentricity until Alice brings home her straitlaced Wall Street boyfriend. "The Man Who Came to Dinner" opened in 1939 to become one of the longest-running hits in the history of Broadway. It portrays an eminent lecturer who unwillingly accepts a dinner invitation in a small Ohio town, slips on the ice outside his hosts’ home, and is forced immediately to their sickbed. While convalescing well beyond his stay of welcome, he turns the house of his indignant hosts into bedlam with his hilarious friends and diabolic pranks. Also included in this volume are “Men at Work” and “Forked Lightning,” two essays Kaufman and Hart wrote about each other.

Three Plays by Kaufman and Hart: Once in a Lifetime, You Can't Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner

GROVE PRESS

George Washington Slept Here (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman

Dramatist's Play Service

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