Love Letters and Two Other Plays: The Golden Age, What I Did Last Summer

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Penguin Publishing Group, 1990 - Drama - 209 pages
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA

In such critically acclaimed plays as The Dining Room and The Cocktail Hour, A. R. Gurney has wittily captured the manners of upper-middle-class WASP America, but never as gracefully or with such dazzling economy as in Love Letters. Tracing the lifelong correspondence of the staid, dutiful lawyer Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and the lively, unstable artist Melissa Gardner, the story of their bittersweet relationship gradually unfolds from what is written—and what is left unsaid—in their letters. A smash hit both off and on Broadway, Love Letters captures Andy and Melissa with a precision of detail and depth of feeling that only Gurney can command. Two other, thematically related plays by Gurney, The Golden Age and What I Did Last Summer, are included, providing a trio of wry and affectionate paeans to love lost, found, and fleetingly glimpsed.

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Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
5
Section 3
6
Copyright

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About the author (1990)

Albert Ramsdell Gurney was born in Buffalo, New York on November 1, 1930. He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, served for several years as an officer in the Navy, and then enrolled in the playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama. After graduation, he taught English at a private school and then joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught American literature and the humanities until the early 1980s. He was a prolific playwright and an author. His plays included The Dining Room, The Middle Ages, The Cocktail Hour, The Perfect Party, Another Antigone, Love Letters, The Old Boy, Later Life, Labor Day, Far East, Sylvia, The Fourth Wall, O Jerusalem, Mrs. Farnsworth, Screen Play, and Post Mortem. His novels included The Gospel According to Joe, Entertaining Strangers, and The Snow Ball. He died on June 13, 2017 at the age of 86.

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