The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams

by Donald Spoto (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1990

  $3.26

  Tom Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911. The son of a womanizing, hard-drinking father and an obsessively domineering mother, he sought refuge at an early age in a world of fantasy and stories shared with his sister and closest companion, Rose. By late adolescence, Tennessee Williams had determined on a career as a playwright and found subjects for powerful drama in the conflicts and heartbreak of his family, culminating in the lobotomy performed on the unstable Rose which left her trapped in a twilight world, unable to communicate. In 1945 The Glass Menagerie , based on this tragedy, brought Williams instant acclaim and from then, at the age of 34, he was considered the greatest voice of the American theatre, producing such enduring successes as Summer Smoke , A Streetcar Named Desire , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Suddenly Last Summer and Night of the Iguana . At the same time, however, his bouts of excess and addiction to alcohol and pills, his homosexual promiscuity and his incessant travelling, combined with overwork to undermine his health and render the last 20 years of his life wretched and creatively barren. This biography is based on a study of the playwright's published work, his private papers and those of his mother, as well as interviews with friends and colleagues.

• New

  Paperback
  1997

  $25.59

  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.