Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) on July 3,1937. His family moved to Singapore in 1939; shortly after, his father, Dr. Eugene Straussler, was killed, and the family moved to India. There, his mother remarried a British army major named Kenneth Stoppard. When the family relocated to England after the War, Stoppard took his stepfather's name. He left high school at seventeen and worked as a journalist on the Western Daily Press while writing television and radio plays, short stories, and his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (1966).

Stoppard's absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) made him famous. The play was originally produced by the Oxford Theater Group on the Edinborough Festival Fringe; six months later it was bought and produced by the National Theater in London. The widespread acclaim that greeted this play promised great things, and in the...