The first biography of the award-winning writer and director in twenty years, by the bestselling author of Making the Wiseguys Weep, published to coincide with Allen’s 80th birthday

WOODY
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Him
by David Evanier
Saint Martin’s Press, November 2015

Director of over forty-five movies, playwright, writer, actor, and jazz clarinetist, Woody Allen is one of the great artistic polymaths of our time. From Sleeper through Annie Hall and on to Midnight in Paris, his films embody a sensibility that’s unmistakably his. In this first biography of Allen in over a decade, David Evanier discusses key movies and Allen’s scandalous romantic entanglements. Evanier has spoken to artistic collaborators, family, and friends, including Allen’s first wife, Harlene Rosen, who hasn’t commented about Allen since the end of their marriage in the 1960s.

Evanier’s biography tackles the themes that Allen has spent a lifetime sorting through in art: morality, sexuality, Judaism, the eternal struggle of head and heart. WOODY will be the definitive word on a major American talent as he begins his ninth decade, and his sixth decade of making movies.

WOODY is the first biography of Allen since Eric Lax’s book in 2000. Since then, Allen has produced new works, and his personal affairs have received significant media attention. An update in the literature is overdue, and this release is timed to coincide with Allen’s 80th birthday. And while Allen’s recent media scandal and personal life plays a part in the story, WOODY is first and foremost a serious, admiring scholarship of a long and successful career.

Evanier has written for the New York Times, The Paris Reviews, The Wall Street Journal and WNYC. He is the bestselling author of nine books, including Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin and Making The Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Rosselli Story. He received the Aga Khan Fiction Prize and the McGinniss-Ritchie Short Fiction Award, and is a former fiction editor of The Paris Review.