Just Wild About Harry (New Directions)

A "melo-melo in seven scenes," Just Wild About Harry is Henry Miller's only excursion into playwriting. Harry is pure Miller, welling up from the same abundant love of life and freedom from convention that made its author the dean of writers dedicated to human liberation. Admittedly inspired by lonesco and the Theatre of the Absurd, Miller's tragicomic slapstick is nevertheless as American as the Marx Brothers and the blues--the simple story of a heartless Harry (the one the ladies are wild about) who learns a bittersweet lesson about life, death, and love. Begun in Europe in 1960, Just Wild About Harry was first published by New Directions in 1963.