The English playwright Harold Pinter (born 1930) ranks among the foremost postwar British dramatists. A master of menace, he invested his plays with an atmosphere of fear, horror, and mystery.

Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, the only son of a Jewish tailor, in Hackney, East London. He won a scholarship to the local school, Hackney Downs Grammar School. In 1948 he entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and then joined a repertory company as an actor and toured England and Ireland. After marrying actress Vivien Merchant in 1956, he began writing plays, giving up the poetry, short stories, monologues, and an autobiographical novel, The Dwarfs, that he would eventually publish in 1990.

In 1957 Pinter completed two one-act plays, The Room and The Dumb Waiter, as well as the full-length play The Birthday Party. The relationship of villain and victim emerges gradually in all three of these plays. In The Dumb...