Harold Pinter: Leading English Dramatist of the Post-War Period

Harold Pinter's dramas are so singular, they have given rise to the adjective "Pinteresque". According to Linda Ayres-Frederick in a review of a local revival of Pinter's 1962 play The Lover, "By definition Pinteresque means 'of or relating to Harold Pinter, resembling or characteristic of his plays', which are noted for their use of silence to increase tension, understatement, and cryptic small talk." (San Francisco Bay Times, October 6, 2006) Pinteresque also refers to an atmosphere pregnant with a high degree of menace in a world characterized as banality.

Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature, is -- as the Nobel Prize citation attests -- the greatest English dramatist of the post-World War II era. Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, in London's working-class Hackney district, to Hyman and Frances Pinter, Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to the United Kingdom from Portugal. Hyman (known as "Jack") was a tailor specializing in women's clothing and Frances was a homemaker. The Pinters, whose families hailed from Odessa and Poland in the Russian Empire, were part of a wave of Jewish emigration to the UK at the turn of the last century. It was a community that revered learning and culture. The Pinter family was close, and young Harold was traumatized when, at the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated from London to Cornwall with other London children for a year to avoid becoming casualties of German aerial bombing during the Blitz.