Tony Winner Hal Holbrook to Release Memoir 'HAROLD: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain'

Tony Award-winning actor HAl Holbrook will soon be releasing a memoir called HAROLD: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain (FSG; September 20, 2011).

Holbrook's memoir is a rich recounting of his early life, with a lot of great details about his growth as a young stage actor, and his development of the material that would become his Award-winning one-man show Mark Twain Tonight! The book has been called "required reading for every young actor" (Annie Potts), and a "beautifully composed story of self-determination and survival" (Robert Redford).

The following are Holbrook's upcoming book events:

9/8 - Los Angeles - L!ve Talks Los Angeles
10/4 - Dallas, TX - Authors Live! @ the Highland Park United Methodist Church
11/9 - Kansas City, MO - Kansas City Public Library

Holbrook will also be performing Mark Twain TONIGHT! on the following dates:

9/15 - Opelika, AL
9/24 - Vincennes, IN
10/1 - Lima, OH
10/7 - Birmingham, AL
10/15 - Pensacola, FL
10/21 - Baton Rouge, LA
11/6 - San Antonio, TX
11/12 - Wichita, KS
11/19 - Holyoke, MA
11/22 - Richmond Hill, Ontario

HAl Holbrook was born in Cleveland in 1925, but raised mostly in South Weymouth, Massachusetts. In the summer of 1942 he got his first paid professional engagement playing the son in The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Cain Park Theatre in Cleveland at $15.00 per week. That fall, he entered Denison University in Ohio, majoring in Theatre under the tutelage of his lifelong mentor, Edward A. Wright.

The Mark Twain characterization grew out of an honors project at Denison University after the War. Holbrook and his first wife, Ruby, had constructed a two-person show, playing characters from Shakespeare to Twain. After graduation they toured the school assembly circuit in the Southwest doing 307 shows in thirty weeks and traveling 30,000 miles by station wagon.

Fortune struck in 1954 by way of a steady engagement on a daytime television soap opera, The Brighter Day, but the following year Holbrook pursued the Twain character at night in a Greenwich Village night club while working on soaps during the day. In seven months at the club he developed his original two hours of material and learned timing. Finally, Ed Sullivan saw him and gave his Twain national television exposure.

In 1959, after five years of researching Mark Twain and honing his material in front of countless audiences in small towns all over America, he opened at a tiny theatre off-Broadway in New York. He was a stunning overnight success, as stunning to Holbrook as anyone else. He continued to do Mark Twain every year and in 1966, on Broadway, his second New York engagement won him a Tony Award and a Drama Critics' Circle Award followed in 1967 by a ninety-minute CBS television special of Mark Twain Tonight! which was nominated for an Emmy Award and seen by an audience of 22 million.

In the 38 years since then Mr. Holbrook has done some 50 television movies and mini-series, been nominated for 12 Emmys and won 5 for The Senator (1971), Pueblo (1974), Best Actor Of The Year (1974), Sandburg's Lincoln (1976), and as host and narrator of Portrait Of America (1989). He has appeared in two sitcoms: Designing Women and Evening Shade, and has made guest appearances on West Wing, the sitcoms Becker and Hope & Faith, The Sopranos and NCIS.

Holbrook's movie career began with The Group in 1966 when he was 41 years old. Since then, moviegoers have seen him in nearly 40 films and most recently Into the Wild, written and directed by Sean Penn, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination.

But Holbrook has never been able to quit Mark Twain and probably never will. He has toured the show in some part of every year since 1954, with over 2100 performances, making 2008 the 54th consecutive year for this remarkable one man show. Mark Twain Tonight! has become perhaps the longest running show in theatre history. Holbrook adds to his Twain material every year, editing and changing it to fit the times and has mined over sixteen hours of Twain with more coming all the time. He has no set program - he chooses material as he goes along.

In 2000 he was inducted into the New York Theatre Hall of Fame; and in 2003 received the Nat'l Humanities Medal from President Bush. 

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