TT: Reading matter

Now that I’m no longer shuttling between New York and New Haven for rehearsals of Satchmo at the Waldorf, I’ve got time to troll through cyberspace for interesting goodies. Here’s some of what I’ve found there:
• Courtesy of the Library of America, here’s a 1939 article from Theatre Arts in which Morton Eustis describes what it was like to watch George S. Kaufman, who directed the first productions of most of his own plays, stage the Broadway premiere of The Man Who Came to Dinner.
• From The Wall Street Journal, Paul Johnson supplies a list of his five favorite short biographies.
• John O’Hara reviewed Jazzmen for The New Republic in 1939, and he managed to say some interesting things in between the self-conscious, self-serving asides that were, here as always, a feature of his non-fiction writing.
• I blush to admit that I’d never read Paul Schrader’s Notes on Film Noir. Now I have.
• Speaking of film noir, my friend Sarah Weinman is very smart about Dorothy B. Hughes, who (among other things) wrote the novel on which Nicholas Ray’s film In a Lonely Place was based.
• Alec Wilkinson interviewed Neil Young for The New Yorker and was startled to discover that he doesn’t read books–and is proud not to do so.
Finally:
• Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, explains how to write a thriller. His apologia is unintentionally funny, but interesting withal.