Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience

By Ronald Hayman

Book Overview

Few playwrights write as much of their lives into every work as did Tennessee Williams, and few had lives that were so obviously theatrical. Growing up amid abusive alcoholism, genteel posturing, and the incipient madness of his beloved sister, Rose, Williams produced plays in which violence exploded into rape, castration, and even cannibalism, projecting dramatic personal traumas. In this frank, compelling study, the distinguished biographer and critic Ronald Hayman explores the intersection of biography and art in one of the most exuberantly autobiographical dramatists of the American theatre. By the time he died, in 1983, Williams's reputation had seriously declined. More than twenty years of drug and alcohol addiction, coupled with devastating openness about his promiscuous homosexuality, had all but destroyed one of America's greatest playwrights, while Williams's new works were increasingly unsuccessful. In recent years, however, Broadway revivals and amateur productions have testified to his enduring greatness as one of the shapers of American theatre. The major plays, such as 'The Glass Menagerie', 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', and 'A Streetcar Named Desire', never disappeared from American theatrical consciousness. Their heroes - Tom Wingfield, Brick Pollitt, even Blanche Du Bois - are portraits of the artist as a very troubled man. Hayman explores the life and writings of Tennessee Williams and shows how they were linked. More than any previous biographer, he unmasks the compulsive, driven man behind the characters and lays bare the pain that engendered Williams's violent apocalypses. 'Tennessee Williams' will change the way lovers of drama experience and understand some of its finest achievements.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300054149
• ISBN13: 9780300054149
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

One of the Best Books on Tennessee Williams

It's a crime this book is so little known even by admirers of Tennessee Williams. Although published by an academic publishers, it's a straightforward biography, deeply researched and printed on excellent paper stock with many rare photographs. Mr. Williams' sad personal decline and personal shortcomings are not ignored but this clear-eyed book also celebrates the genius that he was. This is one of the best written accounts on the greatest playwright America has ever produced.