This collection of nearly three hundred letters gives us the life of Elia Kazan unfiltered, with all the passion, vitality, and raw honesty that made him such an important and formidable stage director ("A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman"), film director ("On the Waterfront, East of Eden[...]

A critical evaluation of one of America's foremost film scholars is set against the social, political, and cultural contexts of his time, in an account that considers how such productions as On the Waterfront reshaped the nation's stage and movie industries and explores his controversial participati[...]