Charlie Chaplin and His Times [Hardcover]

Loved by millions in his heyday, exiled into obscurity in his middle age, and worshipped anew in his final years, Charlie Chaplin has been the subject of many biographies. In this book, Kenneth S. Lynn focuses on Chaplin's personal, political, and romantic associations. Lynn sees Chaplin's obsessive egotism and brutality toward women as a result of his obscure London upbringing and the torment and embarrassment his mentally disturbed mother caused him. Lynn also takes a fresh look at Chaplin's alleged victimization at the hands of immigration officials in the 1950s and performs an intriguing psychological reading of Limelight, which he considers Chaplin's most autobiographical film. Along the way, Lynn provides mini-histories of issues and events that shaped Chaplin's life, including a consideration of the tramp in early 20th-century America, biographies of famous silent film stars, and an account of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

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.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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

Kenneth Lynn's biography of Charlie Chaplin is the best and most readable to date, displaying all his customary elegance and sparkle. As his title implies, Lynn is not content to describe Chaplin's life and work but also ventures into the social "surround" in which the work was received, in the process offering distinctive capsule histories of the movies and other popular arts. Though Lynn clearly admires Chaplin's talent, and takes delight in the movies, his judgments of the man are unflinchingly harsh.

As one might expect from the author of Hemingway (1987), in which the famous he-man of American letters was revealed to be a closet androgyne, Lynn freely indulges here in psychological speculation. According to Lynn, it was Chaplin's childhood loneliness in dealing with a mentally disturbed mother, the anguish he suffered at her "betrayal," and his powerlessness in the face of her frightening need that contributed in later life to his rage for control. While Lynn at times reaches further than the evidence justifies, he has a way of making his analysis seem plausible. -- Commentary Magazine, May 1997, Daniel J. Silver

A full-scale portrait of Charlie Chaplin discusses the life and times of a comedic genius whose roles masked a complex, sometimes tragic and turbulent personal life. 20,000 first printing.

Kenneth S. Lynn (1923-2001) served as a professor at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard. His other books include Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor and his Los Angeles Times Book Award-winning biograpny Hemingway.

Kenneth S. Lynn (1923-2001) served as a professor at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard. His other books include Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor and his Los Angeles Times Book Award-winning biograpny Hemingway. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.