Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh - Hardcover

Lahr, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393021246 ISBN 13: 9780393021240

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and Finalist for the National Book Award.

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: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Winner of the 2015 Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography
American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award
Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2014
USA Today 10 Books We Loved Reading
Washington Post 10 Best Books of 2014

80 photographs

About this title

About the Author:

National Book Award finalist John Lahr is the author of Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, among other books. He 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 (coauthor, Elaine Stritch at Liberty).

Review:

“Offers plenty of backstage anecdotes and high private drama.... But Mr. Lahr, ever the critic, keeps the plays themselves front and center.... The book has already won enthusiastic advance notice...along with blurbs from a kick line of A-list ‘theatricals’ including Helen Mirren, John Guare and Tony Kushner.”
- Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times

“Scintillating on the backstage and bedroom dramas and almost intrusively perceptive on the autobiographical nature of Williams’ art.”
- Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

“Intricately detailed... gripping.”
- Janet Maslin, New York Times

“A masterpiece.”
- Hilton Als, New Yorker

“A crucial contribution to the arguments that should always rage around a man who was one of the greatest American playwrights of his tempestuous century.”
- Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“Raises the curtain on Tennessee Williams.”
- Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

“This is by far the best book ever written about America's greatest playwright. John Lahr, the longtime drama critic for the New Yorker, knows his way around Broadway better than anyone. He is a witty and elegant stylist, a scrupulous researcher, a passionate yet canny advocate... He brings us as close to Williams as we are ever likely to get.”
- J.D. McClatchy, Wall Street Journal

“There is only one word for this biography: superb.”
- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“Brilliant... [Lahr’s] achievement is not likely to be surpassed.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Could this be the best theater book I've ever read? It just might be. Tennessee Williams had two great pieces of luck: Elia Kazan to direct his work and now John Lahr to make thrilling sense of his life.”
- John Guare, author of Six Degrees of Separation

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0393021246
• ISBN 13: 9780393021240
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 784