Biography Essay

Harold Pinter, Britain's most significant playwright since Bernard Shaw, was born in Hackney, a small working-class section just beyond the borders of London's East End. He grew up in a modest brick house on Thistlewaite Road, near Clapton Pond, in an area that had "some big, rundown Victorian houses, and soap factories with a terrible smell, and a lot of railway yards. And shops." His immediate forebears were Sephardic Jews from Portugal, who first settled in Hungary before coming to England around the turn of the century. Pinter believes his surname is the Anglicized version of the Spanish or Portuguese Pinto, da Pinto, or da Pinta. His first nom de plume was Harold Pinta, which he used on his first publications, two of his poems published in Poetry London in 1950.

Pinter's father, Hyman (Jack) Pinter, was a ladies' tailor who worked twelve-hour days making clothes in...