Malcolm Goldstein

Largely a narrow history of art dealing in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the author limns the earlier period in extremely sparse detail. Since that was the era I'm more interested in, I definitely wished for more on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ah well.

The focus of the biography was Kaufman's work in the theater, of course; however, I would also have liked for Goldstein to concentrate a little more on putting Kaufman into the context of his times--mainly 1930s, 1940s Manhattan. If your interest is in Kaufman's plays--who he collaborated with, who produced them, directed them, starred in them, and how long they ran--then this is the biog to read. Goldstein's focus and interest is the theater, and he does an incredibly comprehensive job of show more discussing each and every Kaufman play. In fact, his thoroughness is just this side of tediousness at times.

My favorite Kaufman play, of those I've read (since I haven't seen any performed), is "The Man Who Came to Dinner," a play he collaborated on with Moss Hart. Kaufman always needed a collaborator, and Hart was probably the one he did his best work with. The biographer doesn't really explain why the collaboration broke up, except to say that after years of psychoanalysis, Hart was able to write plays on his own. Maybe that's all there was to it. show less