Gene Wilder Books In Order

My French Who*re

The beloved actor and screenwriter’s first novel, set during World War I, delicately and elegantly explores a most unusual romance. It s almost the end of the war and Paul Peachy, a young railway employee and amateur actor in Milwaukee, realizes his marriage is one sided. He enlists, and ships off to France. Peachy instantly realizes how out of his depth he is and never more so than when he is captured. Risking everything, Peachy who as a child of immigrants speaks German makes the reckless decision to impersonate one of the enemy s most famous spies.

As the urbane and accomplished spy Harry Stroller, Peachy has access to a world he could never have known existed a world of sumptuous living, world weary men, and available women. But when one of those women Annie, a young, beautiful and wary courtesan turns out to be more than she seems, Peachy s life is transformed forever.

The Woman Who Wouldn’t

The beloved actor and screenwriter’s second novel, set in 1903, stars a young concert violinist named Jeremy Webb, who one day goes from accomplished adagios with the Cleveland Orchestra to having a complete breakdown on stage. If he hadn t poured a glass of water down the throat of a tuba, maybe he wouldn t have been sent to a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany. But it s in that serene place that Jeremy meets Clara Mulpas, whom he tries his hardest to seduce.

Clara is so beautiful that Jeremy finds it impossible to keep from trying to find a chink in her extraordinary reserve and elegance. He finds himself reflexively flirting to get a reaction after all, a tease and a wink have always worked before, with women back home. But flirting probably isn t the best way to appeal to a woman who was married to a dumb brute and doesn t want to have anything more to do with men. Jeremy isn t sure how to press his case but he won t give up.

Wilder s prose is elegant, spare and affecting. But it s his romantic s eye for the intense emotions that animate a real love story that makes The Woman Who Wouldn t an unforgettable book.

What Is This Thing Called Love?

The actor and novelist answers this eternal question twelve ways, in stories that explore our most complicated emotion This is a winning collection from an author writing on his favorite topic: love. Each emotionally involving story illuminates a different kind of love: star crossed, intense, needy, eternal, unrequited, even comical. Wilder’s protagonists will be instantly recognizable to his fans: men and women who stumble into relationships that can fulfill them or knock them out cold. Which one it will be depends, often, on the smallest of gestures or reactions. Wilder s stories include: In Love for the First Time, about a lover so shy and studious that he s a funny duck who has to be led by the hand by his equally inexperienced girlfriend About Being in Love, featuring coarse but charming Buddy Silverman, who yearns for connection but looks for it in exactly the wrong kind of woman The Woman in the Red Hat, who shows a writer who has only explored love in his books what the real thing feels like.

Kiss Me Like a Stranger

In this personal book from the star of many beloved and classic film comedies from The Producers to Young Frankenstein, Blazing saddles to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Gene Wilder writes about a side of his life the public hasn’t seen on the screen. Kiss Me Like a Stranger is not an autobiography in the usual sense of the word, and it’s certainly not another celebrity ‘tell all.’ Instead, Wilder has chosen to write about resonant moments in his life, events that led him to an understanding of the art of acting, and more important to an understanding of how to give love to and receive love from a woman. Wilder writes compellingly about the creative process on stage and screen, and divulges moments from life on the sets of some of the most iconic movies of our time. In this book, he talks about everything from his experiences in psychoanalysis to why he got into acting and later comedy his first goal was to be a Shakespearean actor, and how a Midwestern childhood with a sick mother changed him. Wilder explains why he became an actor and writer, and about the funny, wonderful movies he made with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, and Harrison Ford, among many others. He candidly reveals his failures in love, and writes about the overwhelming experience of marrying comedienne Gilda Radner, as well as what finally had to happen for him to make a true and lasting commitment to another woman.A thoughtful, revealing, and winsome book about life, love, and the creative process, Kiss Me Like a Stranger is one actor’s life in his own words.