The Letters of Noel Coward

The first and definitive collection of savvy, witty, loving, bitchy, and often surprisingly moving letters (most previously unpublished) from and to the incomparable Noël Coward, a unique and irresistible portrait of a society and age. The range, charm, and vitality of his talents--playwright, actor, composer, librettist, lyricist, director, painter, writer, cabaret singer, wit--brought him into close encounters, and often close friendships, with the great and the gifted. He knew everybody who was anybody in the theater and motion pictures, in literature and politics, on both sides of the Atlantic (he was even a spy for the Britishduring World War II, along with Cary Grant). Among those at his "marvelous party": George Bernard Shaw, T.E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, the Churchills, Daphne du Maurier, Greta Garbo, Ian Fleming, W. Somerset Maugham, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, Edith Sitwell, FDR, Gertrude Lawrence, and many more.--From publisher description.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.