Fans of the great writer and director Elaine May will nod in agreement when Carrie Courogen describes her as "one of the most singular minds of the twentieth century" in Miss May Does Not Exist, a biography of May's life and career. May's life began with hardship after her father, a star of Yiddish theater, died when she was 11. A few years later, she hitchhiked from Los Angeles to Chicago, where even in university classes "full of bohemian students," she developed "an infamous reputation around campus," in part because she bought clothes from Goodwill and subsisted on apples eaten whole. More enduringly, she got to show off her improv skills as part of the Compass Players, the 1950s comedy troupe, where she developed classic routines with her creative partner, the director Mike Nichols.
Fame came quickly, but May left the act in 1961 and charted a career as one of the few women writer-directors in cinema and, later, a highly sought-after script doctor. Courogen does a nice job chronicling May's work as a playwright and filmmaker, including the controversies, such as the story that she hid several reels of her 1976 film, Mikey and Nicky, to keep the studio from tampering with it, and the gossip-riddled production of 1987's Ishtar, which Courogen calls "one of Hollywood's biggest disasters." May's admirers will welcome a long-overdue survey of her career and a tribute to the comic genius whom the director Clive Donner called "better at everything--writing, acting, directing--than almost anyone else I know." --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer