Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams - Hardcover

Leverich, Lyle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517702258 ISBN 13: 9780517702253

Publisher: Crown, 1995

Synopsis

The bedrock, authoritative account of the little-known early life of Tennessee Williams. "Plainly a work of distinction...It will be great service to Williams's reputation and among other things may bring more of the young to an appreciation of his achievement."--Arthur Miller. Black-and-white photographs.

About this title

About the Author

Lyle Leverich was artistic director of the Atheneum Arts Foundation, and presently heads the editorial board of the Tennessee Williams Literary Review.

From Publishers Weekly

After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty but only slightly bloated first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich?who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer"?covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing?or avoiding it?at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event?in this case, the opening of a remarkable play?this is an impressively argued biography. Even if you don't, it is a compulsively readable story. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0517702258
• ISBN 13: 9780517702253
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 644