Jean Anouilh was born on June 23, 1910, in France. Anouilh studied law as a teenager and worked briefly in advertising. He soon became aware of his strong attraction to the theatre and became one of France's foremost playwrights and screenwriters. Anouilh's works are noted for their theatrical conventions. His plays, many of which are bleak dramas, feature characters facing highly moral dilemmas. He uses such conventions as flashbacks, role reversals, and play-within-a-play to achieve dramatic effects. Anouilh received a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for his play Waltz of the Toreadors and a Tony award for Thieves Carnival. Other well-known works include Antigone, Eurydice and the… film Pattes Blanches. Anouilh suffered a heart attack and died in 1987.
A regular contributor to the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, Andre Aciman was born in Alexandria: raised in Egypt, Italy, and France; and educated at Harvard. He teaches literature at Bard College and lives in Manhattan.