Books by John Gay

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - BEGGAR. If Poverty be a Title to Poetry, I am sure no-body can dispute mine. I own myself of the Company of Beggars; and I make one at their Weekly Festivals at St. Giles's. I have a small Yearly Salary for my Catches, and am welcome to a Dinner there whenever I please, which is more than most Poets can say. PLAYER. As we live by the Muses, it is but Gratitude in us to encourage Poetical Merit wherever we find it. The Muses, contrary to all other Ladies, pay no Distinction to Dress, and never partially mistake the Pertness of Embroidery for Wit, nor the Modesty of Want for Dulness. Be the Author who he will, we push his Play as far as it will go. So (though you are in Want) I wish you success heartily.

With The Beggar's Opera (1728), Gay invented the ballad opera. It is here published for the first time with its sequel, Polly, in which Macheath and Polly Peachum are transplanted to the West Indies. Together the plays offer a scathing and ebullient portrait of a society in which statesmen and outlaws are impossible to tell apart.

Any Way I Can: 50 Years in Show Business presents the legendary life of veteran television and movie screenwriter John Gay, one of Hollywood's most prolific treasures.From an original comedy sketch that launched the broke fledging actor and his new bride onto WOR-TV's first broadcast day on the air in 1949 to writing during the Golden Age of Television, John Gay's memoir details his breathtaking trajectory into Oscar-nominated feature films and Emmy Award-winning television shows. He began writing for television in 1951, when tvs were only in a few American homes and all programs were in black and white. He wrote several dozen episodes of various shows, and then he made the giant leap into films with the prestigous Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), which starred Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. The next year, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Separate Tables (1959), which starred Rita Hayworth and Deborah Kerr. John also wrote yet did not receive credit for Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and How The West Was Won (1962). That same year, he wrote the extremely popular The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which starred Glenn Ford and Charles Boyer. John was much more than a great writer; he was a genuinely good man, who was hoisted into stardom by his writing of so many great screenplays and yet he maintained a good, solid relationship with his family during most of his career. Whether he was adapting Charles Dickens for the small screen, writing a docudrama without landing in jail, or sitting alongside Prince Rainier in Monaco at a performance of his one-man play, John lived show business any way he could and had an exciting run for fifty remarkable years. This richly researched autobiography is co-authored by Gay and his daughter, Jennifer (Gay) Summers, and the book includes a treasure trove of rare photos that capture the glamour and excitement of Hollywood and television¿s Golden Years.

A scholarly edition of dramatic works by John Gay. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

John Gay's satirical opera, written in 1728, was revolutionary because it took poverty and corruption as its subject, and paupers and villains as its characters. The lyrics were set to famous songs of the day making it hugely popular with audiences and a radical departure from traditional opera.

The tale of Peachum, thief-taker and informer, conspiring to send the dashing and promiscuous highwayman Macheath to the gallows, became the theatrical sensation of the eighteenth century.In THE BEGGAR'S OPERA, John Gay turned conventions of Italian opera riotously upside-down, instead using traditional popular ballads and street tunes, while also indulging in political satire at the expense of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Gay's highly original depiction of the thieves, informers, prostitutes and highwaymen thronging the slums and prisons of the corrupt London underworld proved brilliantly successful in exposing the dark side of a corrupt and jaded society.