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:
an audiobook about the major American playwright of his time written by
the major American drama critic of his time.
