"To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature." When Joe Orton (1933-1967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was being hailed as the greatest comic playwright since Oscar Wilde for his darkly hilarious Entertaining Mr. Sloane and the farce hit Loot , and was completing What the Butler Saw but less than three months later, his longtime companion, Kenneth Halliwell, smashed in Orton's skull with a hammer before killing himself. The Orton Diaries , written during his last eight months, chronicle in a remarkably candid style his outrageously unfettered life: his literary success, capped by an Evening Standard Award and overtures from the Beatles his sexual escapades,at his mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and, extensively, in Tangiers and the breakdown of his sixteen-year "marriage" to Halliwell, the relationship that transformed and destroyed him. Edited with a superb introduction by John Lahr, The Orton Diaries is his crowning achievement.
- ISBN10 0749390050
- ISBN13 9780749390051
- Publish Date 6 April 1989 (first published 6 November 1986)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 21 December 2004
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Minerva
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 304
- Language English