The letters of Noël Coward

Lavishly illustrated and annotated, this first and definitive collection of letters to and from the great English playwright provides a divine portrait of an age, from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond. "Superb.... The portrait of a complex, charming, driven, serious and, frankly, courageous artist." — The Wall Street Journal The incomparable Noël Coward loved to correspond with friends, enemies, the famous and infamous, the talented and the powerful, including Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo, Laurence Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Lawrence of Arabia, Somerset Maugham, and many more. Granted unlimited access to the Coward archive, Barry Day presents many never-published letters and has unearthed new, startling evidence of Coward's wartime work as a spy. Along with 191 rare photographs, these letters bring to life the people and events that shaped the twentieth century—and a remarkable man who made his own indelible mark at the heart of it. The first and definitive collection of savvy, witty, loving, bitchy, and often surprisingly moving letters (most previously unpublished) from and to the incomparable Noël Coward, a unique and irresistible portrait of a society and age. The range, charm, and vitality of his talents--playwright, actor, composer, librettist, lyricist, director, painter, writer, cabaret singer, wit--brought him into close encounters, and often close friendships, with the great and the gifted. He knew everybody who was anybody in the theater and motion pictures, in literature and politics, on both sides of the Atlantic (he was even a spy for the Britishduring World War II, along with Cary Grant). Among those at his "marvelous party": George Bernard Shaw, T.E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, the Churchills, Daphne du Maurier, Greta Garbo, Ian Fleming, W. Somerset Maugham, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, Edith Sitwell, FDR, Gertrude Lawrence, and many more.--From publisher description Lavishly illustrated and annotated, this first and definitive collection of letters to and from Coward provides a divine portrait of an age, from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond. The incomparable Noël Coward loved to correspond with friends, enemies, the famous and infamous, the talented and the powerful, including Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo, Laurence Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Lawrence of Arabia, Somerset Maugham, and many more. Granted unlimited access to the Coward archive, Barry Day presents many never-published letters and has unearthed new, startling evidence of Coward's wartime work as a spy. Along with 191 rare photographs, these letters bring to life the people and events that shaped the twentieth century—and a remarkable man who made his own indelible mark at the heart of it.