Tennessee Williams
Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
The definitive biography of America's most impassioned and lyrical twentieth-century playwright from acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr
'A masterpiece about a genius' Helen Mirren
'Riveting ... masterful' Sunday Times, Books of the Year
On 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the show's thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one paper, 'like a farm boy in his Sunday best'. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain calls and became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an American public, Tennessee Williams's work – blood hot and personal – pioneered, as Arthur Miller declared, 'a revolution' in American theatre.
Tracing Williams's turbulent moral and psychological shifts, acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his work, as well as the America his plays helped to define. Williams created characters so large that they have become part of American folklore: Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura transcend their stories, haunting us with their fierce, flawed lives. Similarly, Williams himself swung high and low in his single-minded pursuit of greatness. Lahr shows how Williams's late-blooming homosexual rebellion, his struggle against madness, his grief-struck relationships with his combustible father, prim and pious mother and 'mad' sister Rose, victim to one of the first lobotomies in America, became central themes in his drama.
Including Williams's poems, stories, journals and private correspondence in his discussion of the work – posthumously Williams has been regarded as one of the best letter writers of his day – Lahr delivers an astoundingly sensitive and lively reassessment of one of America's greatest dramatists. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is the long-awaited, definitive life and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writing with sympathy and insight, former New Yorker drama critic Lahr (Prick Up Your Ears) invests the Tennessee Williams of this brilliant new biography with the same vitality and honesty that the playwright used to bring his characters to life. Williams wrote that he "saw every play and every film I ever worked on as a confession," and Lahr looks to his scripts as the chief means of understanding his turbulent life, beginning with the delicate poetry of The Glass Menagerie, which is encoded with sentiments from his fraught childhood relationships with his mother and sister. Quoting extensively from diaries, notebooks, and journals, Lahr depicts Williams as an artist who "made a spectacle of his haunted interior." His detailed account of Williams's work with Elia Kazan on the stage productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and other projects reveals the complex dynamics of one of the greatest partnerships in modern theater, just as his exploration of Williams's troubled romantic relationships highlights the self-destructive proclivities that fueled and threatened his creativity. Lahr's feel for Williams's literary creations he describes The Glass Menagerie's Amanda Wingfield as an "embattled bundle of Southern decorum and Puritan denial" and for Williams himself show a perspicacity wanting in previous biographies. Though Lahr acknowledges the successes of previous Williams scholars, his achievement is not likely to be surpassed. 80 photos.
