John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, shocked and transformed British theater in the 1950s with his play Look Back in Anger . This startling biography–the first to draw on the secret notebooks in which he recorded his anguish and depression–reveals the notorious rebel in all his heartrending complexity. Through a working-class childhood and five marriages, Osborne led a tumultuous life. An impossible father, he threw his teenage daughter out of the house and never spoke to her again. His last written words were "I have sinned." Theater critic John Heilpern’s detailed portrait, including interviews with Osborne's daughter, scores of friends and enemies, and his alleged male lover, shows us a contradictory genius–an ogre with charm, a radical who hated change, and above all, a defiant individualist. “Miraculous. . . . A model of what a literary biography ought to be. . . . The Osborne who emerges from these pages is a character of almost Shakespearean dimensions, grand as Falstaff, volatile as Hamlet, mad as Lear.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer "A terrific story. . . . An appealing, rollicking portrait. . . . The best literary biography I have read in a long time." —Harold Evans, The Wall Street Journal "I cannot recall a biography that was so amusing and intense. . . . If there is going to be a better-written, more entertaining, or more sharply observed performance this year, I'll be mighty surprised." —Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun John Heilpern is the author of the classic book about theater Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa and of How Good is David Mamet, Anyway? , a collection of his theater essays and reviews. Born in England and educated at Oxford, his interviews for The Observer (London) received a British Press Award. In 1980 he moved to New York, where he became a weekly columnist for The Times of London. An adjunct professor of drama at Columbia University, he is drama critic for the New York Observer. 1 The Hurst I may be a poor playwright, but I have the best view in England— John Osborne at home in Shropshire As I remember it now, when I first visited Osborne’s house in Clun, deep in the Shropshire hills, I was struck by its remoteness from what he called the kulcher of London. Though a dramatist may write as well in the tweedy shires as in literary Hampstead, it was as if he had fled all contact with the theatre that had been his life. He moved to Shropshire for good with his wife, Helen, in 1986 and the Clun valley with its surly sheep, close to the Welsh border in Housman country, is about as far from the metropolis as you can get without actually leaving England. Clunton and Clunbury; Clungunford and Clun Are the quietest places under the sun —A. E. Housman, not at his best. The famously urban dramatist was a countryman at heart who loved the place as his own chunk of ancient England, unless, that is, he was the play-acting poseur some took him for. He began as an actor, after all. What role, then, was he playing? Former Angry Young Man now morphed into curmudgeonly country squire? The noncomformist clamped as brawling Tory blimp? The ex-playwright? He had taken to signing his name “John Osborne, ex-playwright” even as he continued struggling with new plays in the wreckage of a life ruled by disorder and passion. Had he become that sentimental relic or absurdist thing , an English Gentleman? But Osborne, everyone knew, wasn’t a gentleman. He was almost a gentleman. Scholarly literary critics attributed the title of his second volume of autobiography in 1991, Almost a Gentleman , to Cardinal Newman. Osborne had quoted from Newman’s The Idea of a University , 1852, in a learned epigraph: “It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain.” The problem with scholarly critics, however, is they don’t know their Music Hall. He didn’t owe the title to the exalted source of Newman, but more typically to the low comedy of one of Music Hall’s great solo warriors in comic danger known as Billy “Almost a Gentleman” Bennett. A rousing poetic monologuist—“Well, it rhymes!”—Bennett reached the height of his considerable fame in the 1920s and ’30s. He was billed as “Almost a Gentleman.” His signature tune, “She Was Poor, But She Was Honest,” was renowned: It’s the same the whole world over, It’s the poor what gets the blame. It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, Isn’t it a blooming shame? Osborne was no intellectual and Billy Bennett’s sunny vulgarity and pathos appealed to his taste. Bennett also created surreal acts entitled “Almost a Ballet Dancer” and “Almost Napoleon.” But it was “Almost a Gentleman” that made his name as he nobly played his part in ill-fitting evening dress and army boots. Thus Osborne posed stagily for a Lord Snowdon portrait for the cover of his autobiography in full country gentleman regalia—tweed jacket, buttoned waistcoat, fob watch, umbrella—all topped off nicely with the prop o