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Harold Pinter was a Nobel Prize-winning British playwright known for his innovative and influential works in the 20th century. Born in London, he began his career with plays like The Room and The Birthday Party, which established his unique style characterized by ambiguity and tension. Pinter's legacy includes numerous acclaimed plays and the term 'Pinteresque' to describe his distinctive approach to drama.

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Harold Pinter was a Nobel Prize-winning British playwright known for his innovative and influential works in the 20th century. Born in London, he began his career with plays like The Room and The Birthday Party, which established his unique style characterized by ambiguity and tension. Pinter's legacy includes numerous acclaimed plays and the term 'Pinteresque' to describe his distinctive approach to drama.

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Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.

Biography of Harold Pinter


Harold Pinter was a Nobel Prize–winning British playwright, director, actor, and screenwriter. He is one of
the most renowned dramatists of the 20th century, esteemed for his inventiveness, originality, and
formal innovation.

Pinter was born in Hackney, London to working-class Eastern European Jewish parents. At the Hackney
Downs Grammar School, Pinter excelled at sports and took up acting for the first time. After school
ended, he avoided enlistment in the military by declaring himself a conscientious objector.

Pinter wrote his first play, The Room, in 1957. It features many elements that would become common in his oeuvre,
including a situation that seems quotidian but is charged with ambiguity and menace. It was reviewed favorably and
was mounted by the drama department of Bristol University. Pinter then went on to write The Birthday Party, a play of
muted anxiety and tension that bordered on the theater of the absurd. The Caretaker (1960) was Pinter's second full-
length play and a resounding critical and commercial success. A fusion of the realistic and the symbolic, it led to his
third play, The Homecoming. In 1966 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Pinter also wrote plays in the 1970s, including Old Times (1970), No Man's Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978). In the
1980s-2000s, Pinter continued to compose plays but also tried his hand at poetry, screenwriting, and directing. He
explained that he wanted to look toward politics at the end of his life, and he remarked that his 29 plays were enough.
In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Pinter died in 2008 of liver cancer. In 2011, the Comedy Theatre on Panton Street in the West End was renamed The
Harold Pinter Theatre. Pinter's work is so influential that his name has been used to explain certain settings or
situations: The "Pinter Pause" describes silences used to convey characters' motivations or personalities, and the term
"Pinteresque" refers to an inconclusive end to a comedy of subtle menace and absurdity.

Study Guides on Works by Harold Pinter

Betrayal Harold Pinter The Birthday Party Harold Pinter


By the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Harold Pinter was working as an actor in England when
Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter was recognized as one he stayed briefly at a dilapidated boardinghouse that
of the most widely-performed and influential would serve as his inspiration for both The Birthday
contemporary playwrights. Born to a Jewish family in Party and The Room. As he has explained in many
the Hackney area of East London in 1930,... published works, he wrote more from...
The Caretaker Harold Pinter The Dumb Waiter Harold Pinter
The Caretaker is one of playwright Harold Pinter's most The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play written by English
popular plays, and certainly one of the 20th century's playwright Harold Pinter in 1957. The short play is set in
most notable works of the stage. It is Pinter's second a single basement room. There are only two characters:
full-length play, but his first major success. Critics delve Gus and Ben, hitmen waiting for a target to arrive.
into its historical,...
The play has elements of...

The Homecoming Harold Pinter Moonlight Harold Pinter


The Homecoming is one of Nobel laureate Harold Moonlight is a one-act play by Harold Pinter which was
Pinter’s most compelling and critically acclaimed plays. first produced in September 1993 at the Almeida
Disturbing, enigmatic, and darkly comic, it has been Theater in London. The play is divided into seventeen
staged continually since its 1965 debut. Pinter’s own different sections which take place in three “playing
words in 1970 when accepting the... areas” of the set: the...

No Man's Land Harold Pinter Old Times Harold Pinter


Although Harold Pinter's No Man's Land was by no Old Times is categorized as one of the Harold Pinter’
means one of his most well-known or popular plays, it “memory plays” that characterized his evolution and
was widely read, viewed, and well-received when first development in the 1970’s through a series of
produced and published in 1975. A tells the story of productions that took a step back from the more
Hirst, a man in his sixties. Hirst is... cerebral experimentation of the playwright’s...

The Room Harold Pinter


Harold Pinter's The Room is a tragicomic play about an
anxious woman whose humble life is disrupted by the
arrival of a mysterious messenger whose presence
portends death. Written in 1957, The Room was Pinter's
first play.

Living in a single-room...

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