"For me, the prewar past died on the day Mr. Neville Chamberlain returned with such gay insouciance from Munich," Noel Coward wrote in his diary (26 July 1945). Coward went on to write some twenty plays, a novel, several short stories, and the lyrics and music for many songs after Prime Minister Chamberlain stepped from the airplane with his notorious piece of paper ceding the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. Coward's knighthood, his work in cabaret, and most of his considered statements about the theater were still to come.

Quintessentially, however, Coward belonged to that "prewar past." Noel Peirce (sometimes spelled Pierce) Coward was born on 16 December 1899 in the London suburb of Teddington-on-Thames, Middlesex, to Arthur Sabin Coward, a clerk in a music-publishing firm and a piano salesman, and Agnes Coward, née Veitch. Coward was a professional performer by the age of eleven; as he notes in an autobiographical...