Television Plays

Here in one volume all the plays that made Paddy Chayefsky a famous man, together with some insights by the author into how they got written. I had no idea, for example, that HOLIDAY SONG ws actually based on a Reader's Digest article about a man who encountered and reunited a husband and wife torn apart by Nazi violence in Europe during the war. Chayefsky says he was given this article to adapt, but basically disregarded every part of it. They didn't call it the "Golden Age" of TV for notbing. What strikes me is that he was so young when he did his TV work, and yet he was able to write parts for the elderly very well. Will anyone who saw these productions ever forger the old cantor in HOLIDAY SONG, the veteran printer in the classic PRINTER'S MEASURE, or Cathleen Nesbitt quietly breaking your heart in THE MOTHER? It's amazing that a man in his twenties and thirties could see so deeply into the future of his own heart and his own old age--an age which he didn't really live to see.