WALTER KERR

Honors and Awards

Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978

Some of Walter Kerr's best known quotations and remarks:

"Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them."

"Harpo Marx looks like a musical comedy."

"He had delusions of adequacy."

"It has an air about it of having strolled in from the street with a few tricks up its sleeve, and if everybody would relax, please, it would do its best to pass the time whimsically."

"As an emotional actor Welles is without insight, accuracy, power or grace. In short, without talent. The only parts he could ever play were parts that were cold, intellectual, emotionally dead."

His Books

How Not to Write a Play (1955)

Criticism and Censorship (1957)

Pieces at Eight (1958)

The Decline of Pleasure (1962)

The Theatre in Spite of Itself (1963)

Tragedy and Comedy (1967)

Thirty Plays Hath November (1969)

God on the Gymnasium Floor (1971)

The Silent Clowns (1975)

Journey to the Center of the Theater (1979)

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR
WALTER KERR THEATER?

Hadestown

Walter Kerr Theater

New York City

In 1990, the old Ritz Theater on West 48th Street was renamed the Walter Kerr Theater in his honor.

CURRENTLY SHOWING: Hadestown. The cult off-broadway hit makes its Broadway bow. Now in previews, opening night 17 April 2019.

Walter Kerr Books and Play Memorbelia