John Lahr

Joe Orton

Fron December 1966 to his murder in August 1967, Joe Orton kept a series of diaries that prove to be one of the most candid and unfettered accounts of that remarkable era. They chronicle his life from his literary success to his sexual escapades.

Including the Correspondence of Edna Welthorpe and Others

The Orton Diaries

”To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature.” When Joe Orton (1933–1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was being hailed as the greatest comic playwright since Oscar Wilde for his darkly hilarious Entertaining Mr. Sloane and the farce hit Loot, and was completing What the Butler Saw; but less than three months later, his longtime companion, Kenneth Halliwell, smashed in Orton's skull with a hammer before killing himself. The Orton Diaries, written during his last eight months, chronicle in a remarkably candid style his outrageously unfettered life: his literary success, capped by an Evening Standard Award and overtures from the Beatles; his sexual escapades—at his mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and, extensively, in Tangiers; and the breakdown of his sixteen-year "marriage" to Halliwell, the relationship that transformed and destroyed him. Edited with a superb introduction by John Lahr, The Orton Diaries is his crowning achievement.

The Orton Diaries Including the Correspondence of Edna Welthorpe and Others

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