Having spent most of his career working with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Martin Esslin appraises American TV with the eyes of both a detached outsider and a concerned insider. "American popular culture," writes Esslin, "has become the popular culture of the world at large. American television is thus more than a purely social phenomenon. It fascinates and in some instances frightens the whole world."

The Age of Television discusses television as an essentially dramatic form of communication, pointing to the strengths and weaknesses that spring from its character....

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In 1953, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents--Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others--shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters' inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these...

A brilliantly perceptive study of the most ambiguous and perceptually fascinating figure of the twentieth-century European theatre

Updated to cover Harold Pinter's most recent plays, including Mountain Language, The New World Order and Party Time, this revised edition offers a comprehensive survey of the whole span of Pinter's writing career.

Flood; Mister, Mister; Only Ten Minutes to Buffalo; The Wicked Cooks. Short plays belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd. Introduction by Marin Esslin. Translated by Ralph Manheim and A. Leslie Willson. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book.