“American artists have grown conspicuously uncomfortable in recent years about portraying the American Dream as anything other than a snare and a delusion, and they are still less likely to look to their own lives for proof that it is both real and desirable. Hence it is both surprising and revealing that the best-loved of all theatrical memoirs–and indeed, one of the best American memoirs of the twentieth century–should be a book by a man who not only lived the dream but also believed devoutly in its essential truth…”