Ocean State Libraries

"A revealing, poignant, and hilarious memoir from the cultural icon, gay rights activist, and four-time Tony Award winner. Harvey Fierstein's stellar career has taken him from Broadway to Hollywood and back. He's received accolades and awards for acting-Hairspray, Fiddler, Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day-and writing: La Cage Aux Folle, Torch Song Trilogy (for which he also won a Tony for acting) and Kinky Boots. But while he is widely known as one...

Riveting, funny, heartbreaking, at once raw and lyrical: these journals reveal the complexity of the actor/writer who invented the autobiographical monologue and perfected the form in such celebrated works as Swimming to Cambodia.
Here is the first intimate portrait we have of the man behind the charismatic performer who ended his life in 2004: evolving artist, conflicted celebrity, a man struggling for years with depression before finally...

"August Wilson (1945-2005) was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who had a particular talent for capturing the authentic, everyday voice of Black Americans. As a child, he read off soup cans and cereal boxes, and when his mother brought him to the library, his whole world opened up. After facing intense prejudice at school from both students and some teachers, August dropped out. However, he continued reading and educating himself independently....

Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice

Kessler-Harris

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Presents an authorized portrait of the Pulitzer Prize- and first woman Tony Award-winning playwright that includes coverage of the private tragedies that overshadowed her high-achieving family, the premature birth of her fatherless daughter and her early death.

Kevin Kling, best known for his popular commentaries on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and his storytelling stage shows like Tales from the Charred Underbelly of the Yule Log, delivers hilarious, often tender stories to readers everywhere with his first book, he Dog Says How. Kling's autobiographical tales are as enchanting as they are true to life: hopping freight trains, getting hit by lightning, performing his banned play in Czechoslovakia,...