Chaplin: A Life is a brilliant and penetrating look into the developmental years, times and creativity of Charlie Chaplin. This book was a twenty-year labor of love by Stephen Weissman who presented a series of semmars on Chaplin to the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute beginning in 1988 and later lectured on Chaplin to the prestigious film school at the University of Southern California. Weissman perceptively realized the treasure lode he could mine in the person of Charlie Chaplin using Chaplin's two autobiographical works published 50 years apart and Chaplin's lifetime oeuvre in entertainment that spanned over 65 years. Weissman wrote Chaplin: A Life out of his personal resonance with Chaplin's humor, his appreciation for Chaplin's immense popularity and enormous talent, and Weissman's abilities as a psychoanalyst, scholar and writer.