That Paddy Chayefsky was the greatest writer ever to emerge from television's fabled "Golden Age" is unquestionable. But that his work for television, theatre, and film firmly places him alongside his most heralded contemporaries - Arthur Miller, William Inge, and Tennessee Williams - is the compelling thesis of Mad as Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky by Shaun Considine.

In Considine's exhaustively researched biography of Chayefsky, we examine the formative roots of the only individual screenwriter ever to win three Academy Awards (for Marty, The Hospital, and Network). From his boyhood in the Bronx to his tumultuous years in Hollywood, Chayefsky emerges here as an ambitious man, devoted in his friendships, hesitant and shy in romance, yet fierce and exacting as a creative force.

His genius for capturing the American vernacular elicited classic performances by such legends as Bette Davis, Kim Stanley, and George C. Scott, and his larger-than-life personality garnered him close relationships with such varied notables as Laurence Olivier, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Bob Fosse, and playwright Herb Gardner. And for each friendship there also seemed to be a fight: Chayefsky's vengeful brawl with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, his tempestuous struggles with Edward G.

Robinson, Burt Lancaster, Zero Mostel, and Ken Russell, and his politically charged hatred for Vanessa Redgrave are just a few of the conflicts detailed here.

Throughout his fifty-eight years, Paddy Chayefsky was a man in search of understanding - of both himself and his changing world. Unhappily, a sense of fulfillment and of his own identity would remain beyond his grasp until his final days. His hopeful optimism in the 1950s evolved into a resolutely skeptical view of contemporary life, as he confronted in his scripts the military, the medical and television industries, and even man's relationship to God.

In Mad as Hell, Shaun Considine gives us, at last, a full picture of a unique latter-century American genius.