Works by
Alan Bennett
(Writer)
[1934 - ]

Biographical

• Alan Bennett: Diaries 1980-1990 (1994)
  Cassette  CD

• Untold Stories (2005) -- Finalist 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Biography (Gay Male)
  Untold Stories brings together some of the finest and funniest writing by one of England’s best-known literary figures. Alan Bennett’s first major collection since Writing Home contains previously unpublished work—including the title piece, a poignant memoir of his family and of growing up in Leeds—along with his much celebrated diary for the years 1996 to 2004, and numerous other exceptional essays, reviews, and comic pieces. In this highly anticipated compendium, the Today Book Club author of The Clothes They Stood Up In reveals a great many untold secrets and stories with his inimitable humor and wry honesty—his family’s unspoken history, his memories of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and his response to the success of his most recent play, The History Boys.
  
  Since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s, Bennett has delighted audiences worldwide with writing that is, in his words, “no less serious because it is funny.” The History Boys opened to great acclaim at the Royal National Theatre in 2004, winning numerous awards, and is scheduled to open in New York City in April 2006.

Collections

• Office Suite: Two One-Act Plays (1981)

• Objects of Affection and Other Plays for Television (1982)

• A Private Function: A Screenplay (1985)

• Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, and Enjoy (1985)

• Two Kafka Plays (1987)
  Kafka's Dick and The Insurance Man

• Poetry in Motion 1990
  Audio.  From his brilliant live performance for television, Alan Bennett discusses six popular poets and reads from their work. The six poets discussed and some of the works included are: Thomas Hardy ("Beeny Cliff", "The Convergence of the Twain", "Drummer Hodge"), A.E. Housman ("To an Athlete Dying Young", and selections from "A Shropshire Lad"), W.H. Auden ("A Walk After Dark", "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"). Also discussed are Louis MacNeice, John Betjeman and Philip Larkin. Two cassettes in a black clamshell case, 3 hours total running time.

• Single Spies Talking (1990)

• Single Spies & Talking Heads (1990)
  Single Spies consists of two plays about Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Talking Heads consists of 6 monologues.

• Writing Home (1994)
  The funny, revealing, and lucidly intelligent writing of one of England's best-known literary figures, Writing Home includes Bennett's journalism, book and theater reviews, his diaries from the 1980s, an account of Miss Shepherd--a London eccentric who lived in a van in Bennett's garden for more than 20 years--and much more.

• The Madness of King George (1995)
  Screenplay

• Alan Bennett Plays One: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy (1996)

• Alan Bennett: Plays 2 (1998)
  Kafka's Dick, The Insurance Man, The Old Country, An Englishman Abroad, A Question of Attribution

• The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van (2002)
  From Alan Bennett, the author of The Madness of King George, come two stories about the strange nature of possessions...or the lack of them. In the nationally bestselling novel The Clothes They Stood Up In, the staid Ransomes return from the opera to find their Regent’s Park flat stripped bare—right down to the toilet-paper roll. Free of all their earthly belongings, the couple faces a perplexing question: Who are they without the things they’ve spent a lifetime accumulating? Suddenly a world of unlimited, frightening possibility opens up before them.
  
  In “The Lady in the Van,” which The Village Voice called “one of the finest bursts of comic writing the twentieth century has produced,” Bennett recounts the strange life of Miss Shepherd, a London eccentric who parked her van (overstuffed with decades’ worth of old clothes, oozing batteries, and kitchen utensils still in their original packaging) in the author’s driveway for more than fifteen years. A mesmerizing portrait of an outsider with an acquisitive taste and an indomitable spirit, this biographical essay is drawn with equal parts fascination and compassion.

• Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf (2003)

• Rolling Home (2003)

• The Complete Talking Heads (2003)
  Alan Bennett's award-winning series of solo pieces is a classic of contemporary drama, universally hailed for its combination of razor-sharp wit and deeply felt humanity. In Bed Among the Lentils, a vicar's wife discovers a semblance of happiness with an Indian shop owner. In A Chip in the Sugar, a man's life begins to unravel when he discovers his aging mother has rekindled an old flame. In A Lady of Letters, a busybody pays a price for interfering in her neighbor's life.
  
  First produced for BBC television in 1988 to great critical acclaim, the Talking Heads monologues also appeared on the West End Stage in London in 1992 and 1998. In 2002, seven of the pieces were performed at the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles for a highly praised brief engagement, and in 2003 a selection of the monologues premiered in New York at the Minetta Lane Theatre. These extraordinary portraits of ordinary people confirm Alan Bennett's place as one of the most gifted, versatile, and important writers in the English Language.

• Alan and Thora (2004)
  Audio.  Cassette  CD

Fiction

• Father! Father! Burning Bright: A Story (1999)

• The Laying On of Hands: Stories (2000)
  Alan Bennett's extraordinary ear for dialogue and sharpness of perception have made him a master storyteller. In 'Father! Father! Burning Bright' he writes with tragicomic insight about a son's vigil at his father's deathbed where their lifelong battle continues to the end. 'The Laying on of Hands,' a brilliantly funny satire, describes a society memorial service for a rather special masseur who died tragically young; and in 'Miss Fozzard Finds her Feet,' a lonely, unmarried department store clerk discovers there's more to life than looking after her brother through her only indulgence, her podiatrist.

Non-fiction

• A Working Life: Child Labour Through the Nineteenth Century (1991)

• The Red Baron's Last Flight: An In-Depth Investigation into what Really Happened on the Day Von Richthofen was Shot Down (1997) with Norman Franks
  The mysterious events of April 21, 1918, the day the legendary Red Baron met his end, have kept the world captivated for decades.
  
  There have been many theories, articles and books concerning exactly what took place but all previous accounts have been overshadowed by this groundbreaking book. Here is the definitive answer to one of history’s most compelling mysteries.
  
  Taking you straight to the site of Richthofen’s final crash, leading aviation historian Norman Franks and pilot Alan Bennett dissect the evidence and expose what only eyewitnesses could see, complimented by a host of forensic and historical facts that illustrate in detail what actually occurred, when and how.

• Loose Canon: A Portrait Of Brian Brindley (2004), Damian Thompson, ed.
  With contributions by Alan Bennett, Anthony Symondson, Colin Anson, Damian Thompson, Ned Sherrin, Nicholas Krasno, P. J. Kavanagh, Peter Sheppard, and Sean Finnegan

Plays

• Beyond the Fringe (1962) with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore
  Cast Recording CD

• Forty Years On (1969)

• Getting On (1972)

• Habeas Corpus (1973)
  Play

• The Old Country (1978)

• Enjoy (1980)
  Play

• A Visit from Miss Prothero (1981)
  Play

• Green Forms (1981)
  Play

• The Wind in the Willows (1981) with Kenneth Grahame

• Say Something Happened (1982

• A Private Function: A Screenplay (1984)

• The Writer in Disguise (1985)

• Kafka's Dick (1987)

• Prick Up Your Ears: The Screenplay (1987)

• Visit from Prothero

• Talking Heads (1988, 1990)

• Lady in the Van (1989)
  Play

• Single Spies (1989) -- Winner 1989 Olivier Award: England's best comedy
  Two plays about Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

• The Madness of George III (1992)

• A Chip in the Sugar (1994)

• A Lady of Letters (1994)

• A Woman of No Importance (1994)

• Soldiering On: A Monologue from Talking Heads (1995)

• Power Pyramid of Abramelin (1997)

• Power Windows (1997) with David Leslie Stead, Illustrator

• The Clothes They Stood Up In (1997)
  The Ransomes had been burgled. "Robbed," Mrs. Ransome said. "Burgled," Mr. Ransome corrected. Premises were burgled; persons were robbed. Mr. Ransome was a solicitor by profession and thought words mattered. Though "burgled" was the wrong word too. Burglars select; they pick; they remove one item and ignore others. There is a limit to what burglars can take: they seldom take easy chairs, for example, and even more seldom settees. These burglars did. They took everything.
  
  This swift-moving comic fable will surprise you with its concealed depths. When the sedate Ransomes return from the opera to find their Notting Hill flat stripped absolutely bare—down to the toilet paper off the roll (a hard-to-find shade of forget-me-not blue)—they face a dilemma: Who are they without the things they've spent a lifetime accumulating? Suddenly the world is full of unlimited and frightening possibility. But just as they begin adjusting to this giddy freedom, a newfound interest in sex, and a lack of comfy chairs, a surreal reversal of events causes them to question their assumptions yet again.
  
  The Ransomes' bafflement is the reader's delight. Alan Bennett's gentle but scathing wit, unerring ear for dialogue, and sense of the absurd make The Clothes They Stood Up In a memorable exploration of where in life true riches lie.

• A Cream Cracker Under the Settee: A Monologue from Talking Heads (1998)

• Her Big Chance: A Monologue from Talking Heads (1998)

• Bed Among the Lentils (1998)

• Talking Heads 2 (1998)

• Telling Tales (2000)
  Ten childhood snapshots from the master of the monologue.

• An Englishman Abroad (2001)
  Audio.  Cassette  CD

• The History Boys (2004)
  An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form (or senior) boys in a British boys’ school are, as such boys will be, in pursuit of sex, sport, and a place at a good university, generally in that order. In all their efforts, they are helped and hindered, enlightened and bemused, by a maverick English teacher who seeks to broaden their horizons in sometimes undefined ways, and a young history teacher who questions the methods, as well as the aim, of their schooling. In The History Boys, Alan Bennett evokes the special period and place that the sixth form represents in an English boy’s life. In doing so, he raises—with gentle wit and pitch-perfect command of character—not only universal questions about the nature of history and how it is taught but also questions about the purpose of education today.

See also:

• Beyond the Fringe...and Beyond: a Critical Biography of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore (1990)
  Author: Ronald Bergan;

• Backing into the Limelight: The Biography of Alan Bennett (2001) by Alexander Games

• Understanding Alan Bennett (2001) by Peter Wolfe

• Alan Bennett: A Critical Introcution (2001) by Joseph H. O'Mealy