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A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography 1929-1956
by John Osborne
Paperback
List: $10.95 -- Amazon.com Price: $9.85 -- You Save: $1.10(10%)
From the author of "Look Back in Anger, "Luther," "Inadmissible Evidence" and many other contemporary standards. It had been years since Osborne's plays had received a sympathetic hearing when he wrote his autobiography, and yet it was received as one of the best of its kind. See the second volume, "Almost a Gentleman," below.
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Acting Up
by David Hare
Paperback
After writing a monologue on the subject of Israel and Palestine, David Hare forced himself to make his debut on the stage at the age of fifty-one in Via Dolorosa. When his success at London's austere Royal Court Theatre led to an invitation to appear in New York at a somewhat flashier Broadway venue, Hare was transformed from a shadowy playwright into an actor alone on the stage every night for ninety minutes. Hare's hilarious diary of his experiences on both sides of the Atlantic tells of his difficulties in coming to terms with his frightening change of career, but also grapples with more serious questions about what the difference is between acting and performance, and whether anyone can learn to do either. "A brilliant piece of reportage about Hare's journey to the Middle East and a cunningly shaped work of art . . . A deeply moving theatrical mosaic." -The Guardian
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Acts of Courage: Vaclav Havel's Life in the Theater
by Carol Rocamora
Hardcover
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Act One: An Autobiography
by Moss Hart
Paperback
Amazon. com Expert Editor's Recommended Book: Moss Hart was in the thick of American theater when everyone wore black tie on opening night and the world's most witty people entertained each other around a grand piano at late-night supper parties. It's an era of glamour that will never come again, but we have Hart's words on paper, and that is no small thing. A renowned director and theatrical collaborator, the brilliant Hart died too soon after the curtain went up on Act Two. If you want to know what it was like to be on the inside track in NYC in the '30s, '40s and '50s, here's a good place to find out.
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A Likely Story: One Summer With Lillian Hellman
by Rosemary Mahoney
Hardcover
Amazon.com: In the 1970s, many a precocious American teenager weaned herself on Lillian Hellman's "An Unfinished Woman," "Pentimento," and "Scoundrel Time." So what if the author didn't look like her onscreen alter ego, Jane Fonda, in Julia. Few, of course, would have dared to act on their obsession. But Rosemary Mahoney did, telling the chain-smoking, hard-drinking Hellman that she would love to work for her on Martha's Vineyard "in any capacity." Who better to toil for than a star who "glorified bad moods, gave them a glamorous edge, brought them to the level of art"--or so the 17-year-old thought. In a fairy-tale-like development, Hellman took Mahoney on as her part-time housekeeper. But the fairy tale was almost instantly to end, and a more complex saga of innocence, experience, and class to begin. A Likely Story is a cautionary tale about adoration and celebrity from one of our more gifted journalists--each scene literally leaps off the page, fraught with emotion recollected not entirely in tranquillity.
The New York Times: ...[an] endlessly fascinating book.... [I]t was Hellman's self-destructive misjudgment to hire a valet with a fierce sense of morality, an exquisite eye for detail, a sharp eye for character, a fanciful way with words and a long memory."
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Alan Jay Lerner: A Biography
by Edward Jablonski
Hardcover
Lerner's brilliance as a lyricist ("My Fair Lady," "Camelot") sometimes overshadowed his great strengths as a dramatist, but this intelligent, lucid book gives due credit to both.
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Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography: 1955-1966
by John Osborne
Paperback
The second volume of Osborne's fine memoir, covering the post- "Look Back in Anger" period. (See also "A Better Class of Person" above.)
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Arthur Miller in Conversation
by Steve Centola, Arthur Miller
Paperback
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Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition
by Michael Holroyd
Hardcover
When Michael Holroyd published the first part of his masterful, four-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw in 1988, the New York Times declared that "there should be no need for another biography of him for perhaps a century...." This single-volume edition of "Bernard Shaw" offers readers a concise version of the longer work that is both rich in detail and manageable in size.
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Bernard Shaw Theatrics: Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw
by Dan H. Laurence (Editor)
Hardcover
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Best Revenge: How Theater Saved My Life and Has Been Killing Me Ever Since -- With Appearances by Joseph Chaikin, Sholem Asch, and Sam Shepard
by Stephen Fife
Paperback
A middle-aged playwright--in conflict with his ex-wife, his current girlfriend, and a legion of creditors--journeys from Hollywood to Atlanta to work with his youthful idol, legendary avant-garde director Joseph Chaikin. Thus begins a roller coaster ride of a very unusual sort, combining personal revelations with theatrical obsessions, a step-by-step disclosure of a master director's rehearsal process with a search for spiritual truth (and a decent night's sleep). Just hop aboard and get a backstage pass to the "holding-on-by-your-fingernails" reality of the contemporary American theater.
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Beth Henley: A Casebook (Casebooks on Modern Dramatists)
by Julia A. Fesmire (Editor)
Hardcover
Beth Henley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, yet there has been no book-length consideration of her body of work until now. This volume includes original essays that contextualize and analyze her works from a variety of perspectives, focusing on her vexed status as a southern writer, her use of the comic grotesque, and her alleged feminist critiques of modern society. Receiving special attention are lesser-known plays which are crucial to understanding Henley's development as a playwright and postmodern thinker.
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The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby
by Robert P. Newman
Hardcover
Melby was fired from the State Department because of his affair with Hellman, and because he would not repudiate her. Based on Hellman and Melby letters, FBI and Passport Office files, Melby's hearing transcripts, and the files of Hellman's lawyer, this book recounts a love affair that was aborted and then revived by the Cold War.
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Cole Porter: A Biography
by William McBrien
Hardcover
Biographer William McBrien gets under Cole Porter's skin in this exquisitely detailed account of Broadway's beloved songwriter. Gerald Murphy, Dean Acheson, Fred Astaire, and Ethel Merman are among the vivid cast of supporting characters Porter encountered during his high-society youth, his time spent living abroad among the Frenchmen, and his years as the toast of Broadway.
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Conversations With Miller
by Mel Gussow
Hardcover
Conversations with Miller offers a personal and revealing account of one of the major playwrights of our time. Arthur Miller is revealed in deep and candid conversation with the highly regarded dramatic critic, Mel Gussow. In this series of interviews, which took place over 40 years, Miller is astonishingly forthcoming about his creative sources, his accomplishments and his disappointment; about his staunch resistance to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950's; about his private life including his five-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The result is an intimate portrait of a cultural giant who is both refreshingly down to earth and a fiercely original writer and thinker.
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Conversations With Stoppard
by Tom Stoppard, Mel Gussow
Paperback
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Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov
by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Olga Knipper, Jean Benedetti
Hardcover
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Diary of a Mad Playwright
by James Kirkwood
Paperback
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Elia Kazan: A Life
by Elia Kazan
Paperback
The tumult of Kazan's life, which encompassed directing great plays and films ("A Streetcar Named Desire," "On the Waterfront"), naming names before the HUAC committee, and later life as a novelist, is fully captured in this prolix but fascinating autobiography.
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Eugene O'Neill's Last Plays: Separating Art From Autobiography
by Doris Alexander
Hardcover
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Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood
by Horton Foote
Hardcover
Amazon.com: The marvelous second chapter of Farewell sets the mood for everything to come in the noted playwright's memoir of his childhood in tiny Wharton, Texas. As a young Horton Foote questions his parents about their "elopement" -- they had to go five blocks across town to be wed by a Baptist minister because his mother's Methodist parents didn't approve of the match -- the intricate web of kinship, friendship, and local geography that shapes small-town life is hilariously yet touchingly revealed.
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Fat Chance
by Simon Gray
Paperback
Gray's mordantly funny account of the disastrous premiere of "Cell Mates" (see our Theatre - Scripts section).
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Frank McGuinness and His Theatre of Paradox
by Hiroko Mikami
Hardcover
Frank McGuinness and his Theatre of Paradox is a critical study of one of the most important contemporary Irish dramatists. It offers an overview of McGuinness's drama from his early plays right up to the recent Dolly West's Kitchen.
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Free Association: An Autobiography
by Steven Berkoff
Hardcover
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Ghost Light: A Memoir
by Frank Rich
Paperback
Amazon.com: When Frank Rich was an anxious, unhappy kid marooned in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., the fact his parents were divorced was discussed "only in the whisper that Grandma Ross used when talking about being Jewish or having cancer." Like so many others who feel painfully different, Frank found refuge in the theater, particularly the classic musicals of Broadway's golden age. After an enchanted trip to see Bells Are Ringing in 1956 when he was 7, Rich writes, "I was now destined to trace my childhood almost exclusively through an accelerating progression of plays, good and bad, that would captivate and kidnap me." What interests him most here is the theater's power to shape lives.
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Hellman in Hollywood
by Bernard F. Dick
Hardcover
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I Ain't Sorry for Nothin I Done: August Wilson's Process of Playwriting
by Joan Herrington
Paperback
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In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights
by David Savran
Paperback
Includes interviews with Christopher Durang, John Guare, Maria Irene Fornes, Wallace Shawn, Marsha Norman, and many others.
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Joe Papp: An American Life
by Helen Epstein
Hardcover
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Joseph Chaikin & Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972-1984
by Joseph Chaikin, Sam Shepard, Barry Daniels (Editor), Joseph Chiakin
Paperback
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Kenneth Tynan: Letters
by Kenneth Tynan, Kathleen Tynan
Hardcover
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Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway
by Frederick Nolan
Hardcover
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Laughing Matters: On Writing M*A*S*H, Tootsie, Oh, God!, and a Few Other Funny Things
by Larry Gelbart
Hardcover
The comic genius who developed the "MASH" series for TV, wrote much of ›Sid| "Ceasar's Hour", co-authored hit plays such as "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" and the popular movies "Tootsie" and "Oh God!" tells readers how these projects -- and he -- came into being.
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Make-Believe Town: Essays and Remembrances
by David Mamet
Hardcover
Amazon.com Books: Mamet's second miscellaneous collection of 24 essays (after "The Cabin") again gives a lively scattershot view of his concerns and obsessions: sketches of friends; a memoir of child abuse; an essay on anti-semitism; thoughts on an early job writing pornography captions; much about the theater, including his beginnings on Broadway. Definitely a clue to the mind behind the dramatic art.
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Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical
by Barbara Isenberg
Hardcover
The musical "Big" never did really make it big, but that makes this chronicle of its creation all the more valuable. This is the way a show headed for Broadway really works -- or, on some nights, doesn't.
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My Life With Noel Coward
by Barry Day, Graham Payn
Hardcover
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O'Neill: Life With Monte Cristo
by Arthur Gelb, Barbara Gelb
Hardcover
Amazon.com: If at first you don't succeed... well, actually, Arthur and Barbara Gelb's 1962 book about Eugene O'Neill was a resounding success by any measure; for years, theirs was the definitive account of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright and his work. Far from resting on their laurels, however, the Gelbs spent the next 38 years continuing their research, interviewing O'Neill's family and friends and digging up new sources of information. Now they've produced O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo, both a rewrite of their 1962 biography and a major literary event in its own right.
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Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood
by Arthur Laurents
Hardcover
Amazon.com: Best known as the author of scripts for such hit musicals as West Side Story and Gypsy, Arthur Laurents began his career writing strong, socially conscious plays like Home of the Brave and Time of the Cuckoo; he also has impressive credits as a screenwriter (The Way We Were) and stage director (La Cage aux Folles). Such a varied professional life makes for absorbing reading in this lively autobiography stuffed with famous names, including George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, and Stephen Sondheim, all of whom emerge vividly in thumbnail portraits ranging from affectionately frank (Stella Adler) to frankly unflattering (Jerome Robbins).
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The Paris Review
Edited by George Plimpton
Volume 141
This international literary quarterly celebrates its 40th anniversary with interviews on the craft of writing with two of America's premier playwrights, David Mamet and Wendy Wasserstein.
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Peggy: The Life of Margaret Ramsay, Play Agent
by Colin Chambers
Paperback
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People Who Led to My Plays
by Adrienne Kennedy
Paperback
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Pinter in the Theatre
by Ian Smith
Hardcover
Eight actors and directors who have worked with Pinter in the theatre talk candidly about what it's like to appear in a Pinter play, to direct a Pinter play, to be directed by Pinter, to work alongside Pinter as an actor. But before that come six interviews with Pinter himself -- ranging from the earliest ever in 1960, when Pinter was 29, through the box-office successes of the seventies and the political plays of the eighties up to an extensive 1996 interview surveying the whole gamut of his work. Also included is an interview with Peter Hall, who has directed the premieres of several of Pinter's best-known plays including The Homecoming and Old Times.
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Playwright's Voice
by David Savran (Editor)
Paperback
Representing the range and diversity of the American theatre today, the major American playwrights interviewed by Savran discuss their work, influences, and their craft.
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Rewrites: A Memoir
by Neil Simon
Paperback
Amazon.com Expert Editor's Recommended Book: Broadway's perennial hitmaster Neil Simon, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Lost in Yonkers, follows the funny/poignant style of his recent autobiographical plays. This memoir takes him from childhood into his years as a comedy writer for Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows," through his early Odd Couple-era stage hits and up to the death of his first wife in 1973. Not a traditional autobiography, Rewrites is a story rich with laughter and emotion, and filled with memories of a sweet--sometimes bittersweet--story.
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Sam Shepard: A 'Poetic Rodeo'
by Carol Rosen
Hardcover
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Sam Shepard (Bloom's Major Dramatists)
by Harold Bloom (Editor), Jennifer Vogel, Anne Marie Albertazzi (Editor)
Library Binding
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Sondheim
by Martha Swope (Photographer), Martin Gottfried
Hardcover
Stephen Sondheim musicals are among the most popular and critically acclaimed Broadway shows of recent times. This profusely illustrated volume tells the complete story of Sondheim's remarkable career. The text is accompanied by 100 photographs, half in full color, from Sondheim's personal files and from the Lincoln Center archives.
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Sondheim & Co
by Craig Zadan
2nd Updated Edition Paperback
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Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Made Them
by Studs Terkel, Garry Wills
Hardcover
Amazon.com: In earlier oral histories such as Working, The Good War, and Hard Times, Studs Terkel showed a virtuoso talent for absorbing the small talk of regular Joes and Janes and turning it into a literary cross-hatch -- Robert Browning and Herodotus, Margaret Mead and Steinbeck. It turns out all this was prologue. In The Spectator, Terkel reveals that if he loved the waitresses and hockey players of earlier books, it wasn't "the way, nor to the same degree, as those in the world of the lively arts." Reading The Spectator, you marvel once again at Terkel's facility with people of all kinds--and his deep familiarity with the American century.
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Stephen Sondheim: A Life
by Meryle Secrest
Hardcover
Amazon.com review: America's foremost musical-theater composer also proves to be a fascinatingly complex and conflicted human being in this meticulous biography by the always capable Meryle Secrest. Stephen Sondheim himself was interviewed for the book, as were many of his closest friends, and the author makes perceptive use of this material. Sondheim the man and Sondheim the visionary artist get nearly equal time in an intriguing portrait.
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Style and Its Origins
by Howard Barker
Paperback
Howard Barker's alter-ego Eduardo Houth first materialized as the photographer of publicity images for Barker's theatre company The Wrestling School, one among many fictional identities assumed by him to screen a range of his activities, including set and costume design. Writing about himself in the third person and in the past tense, the result is a unique exercise in self-description.
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Susan Glaspell: A Life
by Linda Ben-Zvi
Hardcover
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Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell: American Modernist Women Dramatists (Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists)
by Barbara Ozieblo
Hardcover
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Terence Rattigan: A Biography
by Geoffrey Wansell
Hardcover
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The Play Goes On: A Memoir
by Neil Simon
Hardcover
The follow-up to Simon's bestselling memoir, "Rewrites."
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Timebends: A Life
by Arthur Miller
Paperback
A superb memoir. Miller deftly weaves his past and present together, to create a reading experience as rich and satisfyingly complex as his best plays.
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Tom Stoppard: A Life
by Ira Bruce Nadel
Hardcover
Tom Stoppard is, arguably, the greatest living English playwright. His work, from the early Jumpers to the film Shakespeare in Love to the current Invention of Love has changed the landscape of drama. Witty, erudite, passionate, abstract, clever, his works are like no one else's. Who is Tom Stoppard-the Czech-born son of Jews who became the singularly English man of letters? In this vibrant, critical portrait, Ira Nadel weaves life and works into a fascinating chronicle of Stoppard's world on English and American stages. Peopled with such characters as Diana Rigg, John Wood, and Billy Crudup, the book untangles Stoppard's genius against the backdrop of Broadway and London's West End.
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Tom Stoppard in Conversation
by Tom Stoppard, Paul Delandy (Editor), Paul Delaney
Hardcover
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Tony Kushner in Conversation
by Tony Kushner, Robert Vorlicky
Paperback
The author of "Angels in America" speaks.
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We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer
by Lawrence Mass
Hardcover
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Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
by Stephen Greenblatt
Paperback
Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life -- full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger -- could have become the world's greatest playwright. Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and delivers "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity.
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Writing Home
by Alan Bennett
Hardcover
Sweet, quietly wicked collection of essays and musings from the author of "Talking Heads," "The Madness of King George," "The Old Country," and many other plays. Includes the drily hilarious diary of Bennett's years-long relationship with the homeless woman who set up camp in his driveway.
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