Act One

I just finished Act One, a partial autobiography by Moss Hart, who wrote a lot of hit plays in the thirties, forties, and fifties.

It starts off with him living very poor, with his family, in a New York tenement apartment.

It has a lot of quotable excerpts. Like this:

It is always best if one is about to embark on a wild or reckless venture not to discuss it with anybody beforehand; talk will rob the scheme of its fire and make what seemed...daring merely foolhardy. Present it as an accomplished fact, turn a deaf ear to argument, and go ahead with it.

It ends with his first big Broadway success, Once In A Lifetime, a comedy about Hollywood during its panicky switch from silent movies to "talkies".

Autobiographies often proceed at a pace that's somewhat sickly.
But this one zips along quickly.