Sir Arthur Pinero: A Critical Biography with Letters
by: Dunkel, Wilbur Dwight

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1941, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcovrt in a lightly worn dust jacket, 141 pages. Frontis photo of Pinero. Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (24 May 1855 - 23 November 1934) was an English actor and later an important dramatist and stage director. He became a prolific and successful playwright, authoring fifty-nine plays. These include serious social dramas, some dealing with social hypocrisy surrounding attitudes to women in second marriages. 'Pinero's talent was stagecraft. He knew how to organize material for effective presentation on the stage. He understood the mass psychology, the emotional reaction of the group in the theater, and thought little of the individual reader. As a result, the dialogue in his plays is right for the actor and the audience, but disconcerting to the readers. But in particular, Pinero was the master of suspense, motivating the turns in his plot sequence with unerring skill. For he understood stage business, the timinng of motion and sound, and, above all, the reactions of an audience to the physical properties on the stage itself. ' Clean copy.