He wrote plays prolifically from the 1960s-1990s. Pinter has also written for television and film. In 2005, Pinter won a Nobel Prize for Literature. Pinter was married to the actor Vivien Merchant from 1956 to 1980; after a scandalous affair, he married the author and historian Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980. Pinter died on Christmas Eve 2008, at the age of 78.

I think you’d have to call him a Modernist and a Postmodernist. As a Modernist, Pinter’s work is indebted to a naturalist/Realist tradition in that his dialogues are often so close to every day speech that they, ironically, tend to be ambiguous or downright absurd. Naturalism is an objective look at reality, like a botanist looking at the world from afar and realism is the approach of staying as close to reality as possible. What I mean is that he would include awkward pauses, sentence fragments, trailing off . . . and all the idiosyncratic ways we speak. This kind of ‘tape-recorded’ drama showed how our speaking is largely sparse, interrupted and occasionally nonsensical. So, in that respect, it is a prime example of Realism in that it capture reality as a mirror or a tape recorder would. Realism and naturalism were at their height at the beginning of the Modernist period (mid 19th-early 20th). But Modernism also had themes of uncertainty and wandering in a fast-changing world. So, the presentation of actual speech as stilted and confusing was a mirror depiction but it was also a metaphor of the growing alienation and confusion in a world that was becoming populated with faster machines (cars, planes) and larger, clustered cities often depicted as dark and alienating. Pinter’s work showed that his surface depiction revealed a deeper psychological or philosophical take on current/recent understanding of this period in history. The period being mid to late 20th century, which is the transition of Modernism to Postmodernism. Both movements shared some themes such as alienation, uncertainty, and particularly with authors like Pinter, Beckett and Kafka, the element of Absurdity. But Pinter’s experimentation with language is primarily Modern but has elements of the Postmodern in form and function.

Harold Pinter was a British playwright and director who lived from October 10, 1930 to December 24, 2008. He was highly decorated, with 50 awards and recognitions, including the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2007 French Legion d'honneur. In 2011, the Comedy Theatre on Panton Street, London renamed itself to The Harold Pinter Theatre to honor the playwright's legacy. Pinter is considered to be one of the key figures of modern drama.

Before Pinter revolutionized modern theater, plays tended to lean heavily on exposition and characters' articulate elucidation of their ideas and motivations. Writers relied on carefully crafted speech to relate to the audience exactly how and why the character and his/her actions came to be so. This is true in the works of classic playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, and Terence Rattigan.

Pinter, however, preferred to focus on the subtext and tension beneath dialogue—therefore severing the direct relationship between language and intent. In his 1971 play Old Times, for example, three friends are reunited and engage in a dialogic power struggle. The main conflict, however, is not articulated and so it remains the audience's obligation to decipher.

Pinter also did not follow the traditional plot expected of a drama. He is known to have claimed that the audience relied too much on the last-act resolution. Ultimately, Pinter saw drama to be an overheard conversation, therefore liberating it from the constraints of traditional plot and exposition. As he once said:

You don't have to hold the audience's hand; the dialogue doesn't have to illuminate the action. You don't have to clearly define who's a hero and who the villain is.