Understanding Friedrich Durrenmatt

Roger A. Crockett's comprehensive overview of Friedrich Durrenmatt's dramatic and narrative oeuvre reveals the international importance of the Swiss playwright. Durrenmatt gained fame beyond the Swiss borders in the early 1950s with the serialized detective novel The Judge and His Hangman and a series of radio dramas. His worldwide acclaim, however, rests largely on two dramas that have been canonized and anthologized as twentieth-century classics of the world stage: The Visit (1956) and The Physicist (1962).In Understanding Friedrich Durrenmatt, Crockett treats the acclaimed masterworks as well as the failures, following Durrenmatt's conviction that the latter are often as revealing about an author as the former. In addition to his thorough appraisal of Durrenmatt's dramatic canon, Crockett provides careful readings of the dramatist's prose works.