Harold Pinter was born in the northern borough of Hackney, a working-class section in London, England, on October 10, 1930. Pinter's father, Hyman (Jack) was a hard-working tailor of women's apparel and his mother, Frances, a homemaker. The Pinter family was part of the Immigrant wave of Jews that arrived in London around the turn of the century. Pinter's forebears came from Poland and Odessa and brought with them a love of culture and learning. At the outbreak of World War IT in 1939, Pinter was evacuated to a castle in Cornwall for a year where, away from his loving home for the first time, he suffered loneliness, bewilderment, separation, and loss-themes that recur in all his works. He also discovered just how sly and nasty a group of boys isolated from their families could be back in Hackney, where he spent most of the war years, he was...