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Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries compiles eight transcribed panels that were featured at The Tennessee Williams Scholars’ Conference, an annual event held each March in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. This study, the first of its kind, explores issues involving Williams’s drama, fiction, poetry, and films in a discursive format designed to probe and debate the legacy of America’s famous playwright. Virtually all aspects of Williams’s long career are covered in this volume, including the early and late plays, his unpublished work, his use of the grotesque, and his relationships with three of his contemporaries: Carson McCullers, Lillian Hellman, and William Inge. In addition, Williams scholars who teach his work discuss the most effective strategies for bringing his material into the classroom. The unique design of this volume offers a broad understanding of his material for students previously unacquainted with Tennessee Williams as well as fresh perspectives from recognized experts in the field that will satisfy those who are already familiar with his life and work.
Alice Griffin offers an in-depth evaluation of the nine plays that established Tennessee Williams as America's greatest lyric dramatist. Describing him as the first playwright writing in English to combine full-blooded characters, theatricalism, and poetic dialogue, Griffin considers Williams both as a literary figure and as a stage innovator. Griffin analyzes the language, characters, dramatic effects, and staging of these classic plays, and she calls attention to Williams's unique gift for creating dialogue as lyrical poetry yet as authentic as everyday conversation. She reveals the importance of symbolism in his work, uncovers his often overlooked humor, and explains his insistence on "plastic" presentations. Griffin also chronicles the resistance that Williams met when he tried to bring his revolutionary staging ideas to the commercial theater. Griffin viewed the plays as originally staged and discussed them with the playwright, the directors, and the actors. From her association with these initial productions, Griffin shares her knowledge of Williams's frustration with the presentation of his work. She remedies what she considers to be misguided interpretations of those early productions by measuring the original stage productions against Williams's stated aims.
A collection of poetic works by the eminent playwright features substantial piece variants, poems from his plays, and accompanying explanatory notes, in a volume that is complemented by a CD recording of the author's reading of his "Blue Mountain Ballads" and other works.
One of Tennessee Williams's first plays, "Not About Nightingales" portrays the lives of inmates in a Pennsylvania prison who were steamed to death after leading their fellow prisoners on a hunger strike.
A close friend of Tennessee Williams during his early years as a writer gives an account of the literary great's early career, critiques his work, and reflects on the later, more successful time of Williams' life.
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014' USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.
An expansive yet intimate story of desire, artistic ambition, and fidelity, set in the glamorous literary and film circles of 1950s Italy In July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysterious young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter all of their lives. Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in present-day America, until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only copy of an unknown play--Tennessee's last. What keeps two people together and what breaks them apart? Can we save someone else if we can't save ourselves? With emotional clarity and grace, Leading Men seamlessly weaves fact and fiction to navigate the tensions between public figures and their private lives. In an ultimately heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the complex negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani creates an unforgettable leading lady in Anja Bloom and reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century.
Now in paperback--the riveting, revelatory, and sole authorized account of the critical first decades of Tennessee Williams' life. "A huge accomplishment. Lyle Leverich's "Tom" is thorough and passionate, an astonishing tale".--John Lahr, "The New Yorker". Photos.
This new volume gathers some of Williams' most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas, including "The Pretty Trap," a cheerful take on "The Glass Menagerie," and "Interior: Panic," a stunning precursor to "A Streetcar Named Desire."
This is the first complete, critical biography of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), one of America's finest playwrights and the author of (among many important works) The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Night of the Iguana. Award-winning biographer Donald Spoto gives us not only a full and accurate account of Williams's life, he also reveals the intimate connections between the playwright's personal dramas and his remarkably autobiographical art. From his birth into a genteel Southern family, through his success, celebrity, and wealth, to his drug addictions, promiscuity, and creative struggles, Tennessee Williams lived a life as gripping as his plays. The Kindness of Strangers, based on Williams's own papers, his mother's diaries, and interviews with scores of friends, lovers, and professional associates, is, in the author's words, a portrait of "a man more disturbing, more dramatic, richer and more wonderful than any character he created."