The Letters of Noel Coward

By Noel Coward and Barry Day

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9780307537423

Noel Coward

Noel Coward was born in 1899 in Teddington, Middlesex. He made his name as a playwright with The Vortex (1924), in which he also appeared. His numerous other successful plays included Fallen Angels (1925), Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1933), Design for Living (1933), and Blithe Spirit (1941). During the war he wrote screenplays such as Brief Encounter (1944) and This Happy Breed (1942). In the fifties he started a new career as a cabaret entertainer. He published volumes of verse and a novel, Pomp and Circumstance (1960), two volumes of autobiography, and four volumes of short stories: To Step Aside (1939), Star Quality (1951), Pretty Polly Barlow (1964), and Bon Voyage (l967). Coward was knighted in 1970 and died three years later in Jamaica.

Reviews for The Letters of Noel Coward

[yooperprof · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Sorry not sorry for the "low rating" - but this is not the way that the correspondence of a major cultural figure should be published. There's too much of the editor - and too much "editing" of some of the letters, and not enough editing out and separating of what's really important from what is not.Look at the index, too:Noel Coward, homosexuality of: 6-7, 730.Two mentions of NC's homosexuality in a 750 page tome? This book was published in 2007, 34 years after Coward's death, and 40 years after homosexual acts between consenting adults ceased being a criminal act in the United Kingdom. The editor, Barry Day, explains his perspective in the text: "To the end of his life, even when the social climate had become more permissive - he remained firmly private in his private life, a decision that one wishes today's gay community would honor." Well, EXCUUUUUSE me! Barry Day has published a 750 book of Noel Coward's private correspondence, so it seems to me that that the "privacy" horse left the barn a long time ago.