A short life of the author
Elia Kazan (7 September 1909 – 28 September 2003) was a Greek-American filmmaker, theatre director, actor, and novelist who directed some of the most celebrated American films and plays of the mid-twentieth century — A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), A Face in the Crowd (1957) — and who also produced a substantial body of fiction and autobiography, including the bestselling novel The Arrangement (1967) and the monumental autobiography A Life (1988). He is one of the most artistically important and morally controversial figures in American cultural history, primarily because of his 1952 decision to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Life
Kazan was born Elias Kazancioglu in Constantinople (now Istanbul) to a Greek family from the Anatolian interior. His family emigrated to the United States when he was four and settled in New Rochelle, New York. His father was a carpet dealer. Kazan attended Williams College and the Yale School of Drama, and joined the Group Theatre in New York in the 1930s, where he studied with Lee Strasberg and became one of the founders of the Actors Studio (1947) — the institution that trained Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, and a generation of American actors in the Method.
The HUAC Testimony
In 1952, Kazan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named eight former members of the Communist Party, including the playwright Clifford Odets. He had been a member of the Party briefly in the 1930s and claimed that he testified because he believed communism was a genuine threat. The testimony destroyed several careers and friendships and made Kazan a pariah among much of the American left.
The controversy resurfaced in 1999, when Kazan received a lifetime achievement Oscar and half the audience refused to applaud. His defenders argued that he had been courageous; his detractors considered him a betrayer. The question of whether artistic achievement can be separated from moral failure has never been more starkly posed.
The Novels
Kazan turned to fiction in the 1960s, and his novels are driven by the same emotional intensity and autobiographical urgency that characterised his best films.
America America (1962) — based on his uncle’s immigration from Anatolia to the United States — is both a novel and the basis for Kazan’s 1963 film of the same name. It follows Stavros Topouzoglou, a young Greek in the Ottoman Empire, through a harrowing journey to America driven by the desperate desire to escape poverty and persecution. The novel is raw, passionate, and rooted in the immigrant experience with a specificity that gives it lasting power.
The Arrangement (1967) was a massive bestseller — it spent thirty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list — about Eddie Anderson, a successful advertising executive who has a nervous breakdown and begins dismantling his carefully constructed life: his marriage, his career, his social position. The novel is transparently autobiographical — Anderson’s midlife crisis mirrors Kazan’s own — and its portrait of a man who discovers that his entire life has been an arrangement, a compromise with inauthenticity, resonated with the countercultural moment.
The Understudy (1975) and The Anatolian (1982, a companion to America America) continued Kazan’s autobiographical fiction, though neither achieved the commercial success of The Arrangement.
A Life (1988)
Kazan’s autobiography is one of the great American memoirs — 800 pages of brutal self-examination covering his childhood, the Group Theatre, his Hollywood career, his marriages and affairs, and the HUAC testimony. Kazan is unflinching about his own failings — his infidelities, his cruelties, his ambition — and the book’s candour gives it a raw, confessional power that his novels sometimes lack.
Critical Standing
Kazan’s literary reputation is modest compared to his stature as a director, but A Life is a genuinely important memoir, America America is a powerful immigrant narrative, and The Arrangement captured its cultural moment with remarkable precision. His books are best understood as extensions of his directorial sensibility: emotionally raw, psychologically penetrating, and relentlessly autobiographical.
Collecting Kazan
The Arrangement (1967, Stein and Day) in first edition brings $15–$40. A Life (1988, Knopf) brings $20–$50. Signed copies are available. Kazan ephemera — playbills, film scripts, letters — is collected in the broader context of American theatre and film history.