Charlie Chaplin and His Times; - 1st Edition/1st Printing

A portrait of Charlie Chaplin discusses the life and times of a comedic genius whose role masked a complex, sometimes tragic and turbulent, personal life

On the heels of Joyce Milton's excellent Tramp (LJ 5/1/96) comes a second critical biography of film's greatest comic. Lynn (Hemingway, Harvard Univ., 1995) deftly interweaves Chaplin's life with the events and personalities of his era, including British music hall impresario Fred Karno, silent screen star and pal Douglas Fairbanks, numerous lovers and wives, brother Sydney, and Adolf Hitler. Lynn has done meticulous research, consulting census and asylum records to evaluate Chaplin's relationship with his increasingly schizophrenic mother. Through London maps and late 19th-century sociological studies, he detects a lower-rung but not entirely poverty-stricken Chaplin childhood; other dissimulations found in Chaplin's My Autobiography (LJ 10/15/64) are explained as well. Lynn addresses his subject's leftist views and makes sense of the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigations of 1947 that led to Chaplin's European exile until 1973. All a biography should be, this is enthusiastically recommended.?Kim R. Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, Pa.
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Surprisingly, Lynn's richly detailed and psychologically insightful biography of Chaplin is only the second popular, comprehensive book written about this icon of pantomimic virtuosity, socially significant comedy, and cinematic innovation in a dozen years, and the first to diligently link Chaplin's traumatic childhood to his complex personality and indelible films. Lynn, whose previous books focus on writers, portrays Chaplin as a man haunted by his mother's mental illness and guided by the only things he could trust: his ability to assume roles and entertain. As Lynn analyzes Chaplin's immense ambition and irascibility and the tremendous appeal of his brilliant and edgy humor, he reveals the tangles of his uneasy associations with Hollywood colleagues and the painful outcomes of his abusive and manipulative relationships with women. Chaplin's life is truly an enormous subject, embracing, as it does, the rapid rise of the movie industry, issues of censorship, the birth of Communism and the virulent anti-Communist backlash, and all manner of familial and gender-based conflicts, and Lynn does a magisterial job of knitting it all together, allowing Chaplin to emerge as fresh and evocative as the Little Tramp in his first incarnation. Donna Seaman