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Woody Allen's Top Book Recommendations

Film Director

Want to know what books Woody Allen recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Woody Allen's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Elia Kazan

From the late forties through the sixties, Elia Kazan was the most important and influential director in America, and the only one who managed simultaneously to dominate both theater and film. In that role he manifestly shaped the conception and writing, as well as the presentation, of many of the period's iconic works, reshaping the values of the stage and bringing a new realism and intensity of performance to the screen. His various achievements include the original Broadway productions of The Skin of Our Teeth, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman and such Hollywood films as Gentleman's... more
Recommended by Woody Allen, and 1 others.

Woody AllenThis is the best show business book that I’ve read. It’s brilliantly written, and it’s about a brilliant director who was very meaningful to me when I was growing up and becoming a filmmaker. (Source)

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2

The World Of S.J.Perelman

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Recommended by Woody Allen, and 1 others.

Woody AllenThe funniest human being in my lifetime, in any medium — whether it is stand-up, television, theatre, prose or movies — is S J Perelman. There is nobody funnier than S J Perelman. (Source)

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3

Really the Blues

Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller. Really the Blues, the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe, is the story of an unusual and unusually American life, and a portrait of a man who... more
Recommended by Woody Allen, and 1 others.

Woody AllenThe story, while probably just a lot of junk, was compelling for me because it was about many musicians whose work I knew and admired, and the in-and-outs of jazz joints that I knew about. (Source)

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4

The Catcher in the Rye

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this... more

Bill GatesOne of my favorite books ever. (Source)

Woody AllenIt was such a relief from the other books I was reading at the time, which all had a quality of homework to them. (Source)

Chigozie ObiomaHe sees everybody as phony because they take life too seriously. (Source)

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