Literary Birthday – 15 June – Adam Rapp

Happy Birthday, Adam Rapp, born on 15 June 1968.

Adam Rapp Quotes

1. I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It’s just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.
2. I have to be entertained by what I’m writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.
3. With playwriting, there’s a lot of false starts. Ill-fated first acts, etcetera. I blame it all on Shakespeare. He stole all my ideas like three hundred years before I was even born. He futuristically ruined my career.
4. You have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.
5. I think there is a complicated side effect to overcoming evil in that we are forever changed by it. I think after we ingest some of the cruelty of the world, it takes years off of our lives, but it also gives us wisdom and a little grace, hopefully a sense of compassion.
6. I like to write about teenagers because it’s such an uncertain and dramatic time.
7. One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.
8. We only have so much time… Time will kill you – it really will.

Adam Rapp is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, musician, and film director. His play, Red Light Winter, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006. Rapp has been the recipient of the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and Boston’s Elliot Norton Award; and was short-listed for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His novels include The Year of Endless Sorrows (2006), Know Your Beholder (2015) and Wolf at the Table (2024). He has taught at the Yale School of Drama. Click here for a list of his young adult novels.

Source for image: Macmillan Publishers Photo Credit: Sham Hinchey

by Amanda Patterson
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