Best known as a film director and, in recent years, as a screen actor, John Huston has had a no less productive and distinctive career as a screenwriter. He was born to Rhea and Walter Huston in 1906 in a Missouri town named Nevada. At the time his father had given up ambitions as a stage actor to raise a family on his earnings as a civil engineer. But Walter Huston returned to vaudeville and the stage in 1909; he went on to become a highly successful actor on Broadway and in motion pictures. John Huston's parents divorced in 1913, and shortly thereafter his mother resumed her career in journalism, which she had abandoned in favor of marriage. Huston's boyhood and adolescence were spent in a series of boarding schools; his vacations brought him in contact alternately with the world of theater and that of the popular press. Huston ended his...