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Beth Henley is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actress who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Crimes of the Heart. Learn about her biography, works, themes, and influences in this comprehensive article.
Learn about Beth Henley, an American playwright of regional dramas set in Southern towns, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Crimes of the Heart. Find out more about her life, education, and other plays, such as The Miss Firecracker Contest and The Jacksonian.
Crimes of the Heart is a play by American playwright Beth Henley. It is set in Hazlehurst, Mississippi in the mid-20th century. The play won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. In 1986, the play was novelized and released as a book, written by Claudia Reilly.
Examine the life, times, and work of Beth Henley through detailed author biographies on eNotes.
Beth Henley’s first professionally produced play, Crimes of the Heart, won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1981 after a successful New York production (prior to New York, it had been done in Louisville, Baltimore, and St. Louis in 1979 and 1980).
With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental.
HENLEY, Beth. Born Elizabeth Becker Henley, 8 May 1952, Jackson, Mississippi. Daughter of Charles B. and Lydy B. Caldwell Henley. The eldest of three daughters of an attorney and an actress, Henley started out as an actress before beginning to write plays during a dry spell in her acting career.
