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Arcadia Author Biography

Tom Stoppard is regularly cited as one of England's greatest playwrights, alongside such national treasures as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Osborn, David Hare, and Alan Ayckborn. Yet, even among such lauded company, Stoppard's place is considered unique, for he writes plays, and creates worlds, unlike other dramatists. In a career that has spanned three decades and more than two-dozen plays, Stoppard has consistently made his audiences laugh, cry, and think, all at the same time. In a New Yorker review of Stoppard's Arcadia, critic John Lahr explained, "The three-ring circus of Stoppard's mind pulls them in at the box office, where news of the intellect, as opposed to the emotions, is a rarity.... Stoppard's mental acrobatics flatter an audience's intelligence and camouflage the avowed limits of his plotting and his heart."

Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, on July 3,1937. When he was only two,...
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