Actor, director, dramatist, and screenwriter, as well as author of several novels and memoirs, Garson Kanin is remembered today primarily for a single play, Born Yesterday (1946), the first and most s...
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Critical Essay by Phoebe-lou Adams
[One Hell of an Actor] is an engaging example of the value of ingenious construction. If Mr. Kanin had begun with the overture and followed his theatrical hero to th...
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Critical Essay by Dan Wakefield
[With "One Hell of an Actor,"] Mr. Kanin has written a chatty, intentionally gossipy novel (using real names of the famous interspersed with the fictional...
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Critical Essay by Doris Grumbach
If youth is wasted on the young, old age has not been wasted on Garson Kanin. At 66 (hardly old, except for the thesis of his book), he is determined to declare war &#...
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Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
Garson Kanin's novel, "Moviola," reads like an uncut version of a 1940's "spectacular." Here's the movie industry fro...
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Critical Essay by David Wilson
[Moviola] is less a novel about Hollywood than a misty-eyed recounting of a favourite dream.
Garson Kanin wrote the scripts of the sharpest Hepburn-Tracy comedies. More ...
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Critical Essay by Nora Johnson
Garson Kanin has been marinating in the theater since before most of us were ever in an audience…. [In his eighth] novel, "Smash"—the story o...
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Critical Essay by Zachary Leader
[Smash is] an "insider's" novel, one whose appeal lies in its promise to "tell all" or "take the lid off." It is also,...
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Critical Essay by Howard Taubman
The basic idea of "Do Re Mi" contains rich promise for a musical. Mr. Kanin's book takes a look at the juke-box racket, the music and record busin...
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Critical Essay by Howard Taubman
In "A Gift of Time" death is the inescapable enemy. In the opening scene it is clear that Charles Wertenbaker, a writer of 53, attractive, urbane and mat...
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Critical Essay by Henry Hewes
How does one prepare oneself for imminent death in this American age of leisure, faithlessness, and futile striving for identity? "A Gift of Time," Garson K...
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Critical Essay by John Coleman
Garson Kanin's Tracy and Hepburn has a few pictures, no index at all and is strictly for those diehards who lap up 'affectionate memoirs'. Mr Kanin ...
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Critical Essay by Edward Weeks
[A Thousand Summers] is a love story, told in reverie, by Freeman Osborn, a solitary Yankee, owner of the Edgartown Pharmacy on Martha's Vineyard…. Freeman...
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Critical Essay by Joel Sayre
"Hollywood," to my mind, has a couple of flaws: one minor, the other major. Kanin introduces a great number of characters in his memoirs. The reflective read...
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Garson Kanin
