Tennessee Williams

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTIONThe 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 YearOn 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 homosexua
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