I have become much more optimistic than I was when I […] wrote Awakenings, for there has been a significant number of patients who, following the vicissitudes of their first years on L-DOPA, came to do – and still do – extremely well. Such patients have undergone an enduring awakening, and enjoy possibilities of life which had been impossible, unthinkable, before the coming of L-DOPA.[3]
The 1976 edition of the book is dedicated to the memory of Sacks's close friend the poet W. H. Auden, and bears an extract from Auden's 1969 poem The Art of Healing:
'Healing',
Papa would tell me,
'is not a science,
but the intuitive art
of wooing Nature.'
Prior to his death in 1973, Auden wrote, "Have read the book and think it a masterpiece".[4] In 1974 the book won the Hawthornden Prize. [5][6]
In popular culture
The book inspired a play, two films, a ballet and an opera:
1974: the documentary filmAwakenings, produced by Duncan Dallas for Yorkshire Television as the first episode and pilot of the British television programme Discovery.[7] The documentary won a Red Ribbon at the 1978 American Film Festival and first prize at the 1978 International Rehabilitation Film Festival.
^Halliwell, Martin Romantic Science and the Experience of Self: Transatlantic Crosscurrents from William James to Oliver Sacks, Routledge, 1999 Footnote 23
Other Places – Listed in "Plays" section of haroldpinter.org. Includes photograph of playbill, production details, and retyped performance review by Alan Jenkins, originally published in The Times Literary Supplement entitled "The Withering of Love", reproduced with permission.