Tom Stoppard Books In Order

Publication Order of The Coast of Utopia Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Plays

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard is a Czech born British playwright and screenwriter. He’s written for stage, film, radio, and television, finding prominence with his plays. His work covers themes of political freedom, human rights, and censorship, often times delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Tom was knighted for his contribution to the theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

While being born in Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937, he left as a child refugee, fleeing from imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war in 1946, having spent the previous 3 years in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After he was educated at schools in Yorkshire and Nottingham, he became a journalist, then a drama critic and finally a playwright in 1960.

He started writing short radio plays in 1953 and 1954 and he finished his first play “A Walk on the Water” (later re-titled “Enter a Free Man”). Within just a week of sending the play off to an agent he got his version of the “Hollywood style telegrams which change struggling young artists lives”. Tom has said the play owed much to “Death of A Salesman” by Arthur Miller and “Flowering Cherry” by Robert Bolt.

Tom left school when he was 17 and started working for the Western Daily Press in Bristol as a journalist, without attending university. Years later, he came to regret this choice to forgo a university education, however at the time he loved his work as a journalist and was passionate about his career. He worked at the paper from 1954 until 1958, when the Bristol Evening World offered him the job of feature writer, humor columnist, and secondary drama critic, taking him into the theater world.

In 1964, he got a Ford Foundation grant which enabled him to spend 5 months writing in a Berlin mansion, emerging after with a 1 act play called “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear”, which evolved into his Tony winner, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”.

Tom’s been married three times. His first was to a nurse, Josie Ingle, which lasted from 1965 until 1972. His second was to Miriam Stern which lasted from 1972 until 1992; they separated when he started a relationship with Felicity Kendal, an actress. Tom also had a relationship with Sinead Cusack, however she made it crystal clear that she wished to stay married to Jeremy Irons and stay close to their two sons. He married again in 2014 to Sabrina Guinness.

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” is a play that was released in 1967. This is acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, and is the fabulously inventive story about Hamlet as told from the worm’s eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play. Tom’s best known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy get a chance to finally take the lead role, however do so in a world where echoes of “Waiting for Godot” resound, where illusion and reality intermix, and where fate leads these two heroes to a tragic yet inevitable end.

Tom got catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights nearly overnight when this first opened in London back in ‘67. Its subsequent New York run brought it the exact same enthusiastic acclaim, and the play’s since been performed a number of times in all the major theatrical centers of the world. It’s won top honors for playwright and play in a poll of London Theater critics, and in its printed form it got selected as being one of the “Notable Books of 1967” by the American Library Association.

“Voyage” is the first novel in the “Coast of Utopia” series and was released in 2002. This book kicks off Tom’s long awaited and monumental trilogy which explores a group of friends that came of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term intelligentsia was coined.

Among them are Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature. Michael Bakunin the anarchist, who had been set to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses. Vissarion Belinsky, the brilliant and erratic young critic. And Alexander Herzen, who is a nobleman’s son and the first self-proclaimed socialist in all of Russia, who becomes the main focus of this drama of betrayal, politics, loss, and love.

In this series, Tom presents this inspired examination of the struggle between utopian idealism, romantic anarchy, and practical reformation.

“Rock N Roll” is a play that was released in 2006. This is an electrifying collision of the revolutionary and the romantic. It’s 1968 and the world’s ablaze with rebellion, accompanied by a soundtrack of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Jan, while clutching his prized collection of rock albums, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia right when the Soviet tanks come rolling into Prague.

When security forces start to tighten their grip on artistic expression, Jan gets inexorably drawn toward this dangerous act of dissent. Back in England, Jan’s volcanic mentor, named Max, faces a war of his own while his free-spirited daughter and his cancer stricken wife try to break through his walls of academic and emotional obstinancy.

Over the following 20 years of espionage, love, loss, and chance, the extraordinary lives of Max and Jan spin and intersect up until one unexpected reunion forces them both to see what’s truly worth the fight.

“Leopoldstadt” is a play that was released in 2020. At the start of the 20th century, Leopoldstadt was the crowded and old Jewish quarter of Vienna. However, Hermann Merz, this baptized Jew and manufacturer that is married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered together in the Merz apartment in a fashionable section of the city, Hermann’s extended family are right at the heart of Tom’s intimate yet epic drama.

By the time we’ve taken our leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and (for Austrian Jews) the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them got murdered. It’s for the survivor’s to pass on such a story which has yet to even end.