British playwright David Hare was born on June 5, 1947, in St. Leonard's-on-Sea in Sussex along the southeastern coast of England. Though he doesn't like "psychologizing," or over-emphasizing the importance of his early years to his current artistic output, in an interview with Mel Gussow published in the New York Times Magazine, Hare admitted his birth was "on the wave of postwar optimism. Everyone came home from the war and had children. Bang on the day I was born, the Marshall Plan was announced, and Europe became Europe." Accordingly, like many of his contemporaries, this Postwar period in British history has figured prominently in Hare's plays.

Hare began his career in the "Fringe Theatre" movement of London in the late-1960s and early 1970s. He was a literary manager at the Royal Court Theatre in 1969, where he earned about $15 a week plowing through dozens of hopeful manuscripts in...