Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
Written by John Lahr
4/5
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About this audiobook
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.
John Lahr
John Lahr, the author of eighteen books, was the senior drama critic of The New Yorker for over two decades. He has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and is the first critic ever to win a Tony Award for coauthoring the 2002 Elaine Stritch at Liberty.
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Reviews for Tennessee Williams
33 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5There is a lot of interesting material here, but this book is a mess. (The subtitle should be your first hint.) Overwrought in some places, poorly organized, and confusing at times. Someday someone will write a great biography of Tennessee Williams. This isn't it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything you ever wanted to know about Tennessee Williams perhaps the greatest American dramatist and more. A tremendously well researched biography chock full of interesting photos of his friends, family, lovers and professional acquaintances. Williams was a lonely troubled man who grew up in a dysfunctional family, He was able to write about his life in his plays using his characters to represent those around him. There is drinking, drugs, lovers and thoughtful introspection and writing plays gave this insecure author a therapy of sorts. I loved this book and see why it got all the acclaim that it did.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This won the National Book Critics Circle biography award for 2014, and though I have no huge interest in theater I try to read all such winners. It is a big book (602 pages of text, a neat and helpful 10-page chronology, 105 pages of Notes, 6 pages of Sources, 9 pages of Credits, and an index).It is prety exhaustive in discussing the plays and this is interesting when dealing with the best-known plays, most of which I have read or seen the movies made therefrom, but the attention to the less well-known plays I admit were a drag to read. There is a huge amount of attention paid to Williams's boyfriends, which was not inspiring reading. While Williams was clearly a major figure in American theater, it was annoying to realize how many dumb things he did. He did become a Catholic, though that his conversion had any effect on his attitude toward the Sixth Commandment does not appear in this account. For much of the reading I was not exuberantly interested but when I had finished the book I was glad to have read it, since it really does a good job showing the stature of Williams in the dram world of his time and in the time since. Since he became successful early with The Glass Menagerie, he never had any money problems and spent money in ways that seemed to me extremely foolish--but his income even after his death has been great and his plays are often performed--to the benefit of his estate.