Download or read book Leading Men written by Christopher Castellani and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expansive yet intimate story of desire, artistic ambition, and fidelity, set in the glamorous literary and film circles of 1950s Italy In July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysterious young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter all of their lives. Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in present-day America, until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only copy of an unknown play--Tennessee's last. What keeps two people together and what breaks them apart? Can we save someone else if we can't save ourselves? With emotional clarity and grace, Leading Men seamlessly weaves fact and fiction to navigate the tensions between public figures and their private lives. In an ultimately heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the complex negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani creates an unforgettable leading lady in Anja Bloom and reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century.
Download or read book Notebooks written by Margaret Rose Thornton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams's notebooks follow his growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments.
Download or read book The World of Tennessee Williams written by Richard Freeman Leavitt and published by Hansen Publishing Group LLC. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World of Tennessee Williams offers a survey of the life and career of one of America¿s greatest dramatists from his birth in 1911 to his death in 1983. Richard Leavitt was in a unique position to create such a volume since he was a friend of Tennessee¿s and followed his career closeup. Kenneth Holditch, who has undertaken the task of completing the text was a friend of Leavitt¿s and knew Tennessee Williams. It has been his desire to carry to fruition the original plan Dick Leavitt conceived in the 1970s and augmented in 1983 when Williams died.
Download or read book Role Models written by John Waters and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse, and hilarious artistic minds of our time. From the incomparable John Waters, a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich—and happily horrify readers everywhere. Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities—some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis—these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness.
Download or read book His Other Life written by Melanie McCabe and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story waiting to be told -- A character named Terrence McCabe -- Three childhoods -- The distant hill -- Hazel asks for help -- Down in Mexico -- Families, destroyed and repaired -- Hazel's day in court -- The mystery man -- Pretend it never happened -- Something cloudy becomes clear -- The mystery women -- Mr. McCabe goes to Washington -- Letting go.
Download or read book Follies of God written by James Grissom and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkably illuminating portrait of Tennessee Williams lifts the veil on the heart and soul of his artistic inspiration: the unspoken collaboration between playwright and actor. At a low moment in Williams’s life, he summoned to New Orleans a young twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written him a letter asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on his behalf to find out if he or his work had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. Among the more than seventy women and men with whom Grissom talked were giants of American theater and film: Lillian Gish, (“the escort who brought me to Blanche”), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche DuBois on Broadway), Eva Le Gallienne (“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper”), Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and many more. Follies of God provides dazzling insight into how Williams conjured the dramatic characters and plays that so transformed American theater.
Download or read book Something Cloudy Something Clear written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The playwright dramatizes his experiences in Cape Cod during the pivotal summer of 1940, when he met his first great love and openly acknowledged his homosexuality.
Download or read book The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams 1945 1957 written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features letters written by the American playwright, revealing his childhood experiences, college years struggling with goals, grades, and money, and his emerging relationships.
Download or read book The Luck of Friendship The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin written by James Laughlin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chronicle of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship. In December 1942, two guests at a Lincoln Kirstein mixer bonded over their shared love of Hart Crane’s poetry. One of them was James Laughlin, the founder of a small publishing company called New Directions, which he had begun only seven years earlier as a sophomore at Harvard. The other was a young playwright named Thomas Lanier Williams, or "Tennessee," as he had just started to call himself. A little more than a week after that first encounter, Tennessee sent a letter to Jay—as he always addressed Laughlin in writing— expressing a desire to get together for an informal discussion of some of Tennessee’s poetry. "I promise you it would be extremely simple," he wrote, "and we would inevitably part on good terms even if you advised me to devote myself exclusively to the theatre for the rest of my life." So began a deep friendship that would last for forty-one years, through critical acclaim and rejection, commercial success and failure, manic highs, bouts of depression, and serious and not-so-serious liaisons. Williams called Laughlin his "literary conscience," and New Directions serves to this day as Williams’s publisher, not only for The Glass Menagerie and his other celebrated plays but for his highly acclaimed novels, short stories, and volumes of poetry as well. Their story provides a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century and reveals the struggles of a great artist, supported in his endeavors by the publisher he considered a true friend.
Download or read book Tennessee Williams Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh written by John Lahr and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014' USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 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.
Download or read book Moise and the World of Reason written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What’s not to like about Tennessee Williams’s most forthright work about homosexual love, with its gay figure skaters, runaways, and sex? An erotic, sensual, and comic novel that was a generation ahead of its time, Moise and the World of Reason has at its center the need of three people for each other: Lance, the beautiful black figure skater full of love and lust for young men as well as a craving for drugs; the nameless gay young narrator, a runaway writer from Alabama who lives near the piers of New York City’s West Village, c. 1975, frantically filling notebooks with his observations; and Moise, a young woman who speaks in riddles and can never finish her paintings or consummate her affairs. The long unavailable Moise and the World of Reason represents a kind of uncensored Williams, radically frank, fully articulated, and deeply tender: a true gem.
Download or read book 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1966-01-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteen one-act plays collected in this volume include some of Tennessee Williams's finest and most powerful work. They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater. Only one of these plays (The Purification) is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion) or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman (The Last of My Solid Gold Watches) or of delinquent children (This Property is Condemned), his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life—its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love—into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue. Mr. Williams's views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, "Something wild...," which serves as an introduction to this collection.
Download or read book Tennessee Williams in Provincetown written by David Kaplan and published by Hansen Publishing Group LLC. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tennesse Williams in Provincetown is the story of Tennesse Williams' four summer seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts: 1940, '41, '44 and '47. During that time he wrote plays, short stories, and jewel-like poems. In Provincetown Williams fell in love unguardedly for perhaps the only time in his life. He had his heart broken there, perhaps irraparably. The man he thought might replace his first lover tried to kill him there, or at least Williams thought so. Williams drank in Provincetown, he swam there, and he took conga lessons there. He was poor and then rich there; he was photographed naked and clothed there. He was unknown and then famous--and throughout it all Williams wrote every morning. The list of plays Williams worked on in Provincetown include The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, the beginnings of The Night of the Iguana and Suddenly Last Summer, and an abandoned autobiographical play set in Provincetown, The Parade. Tennessee Williams in Provincetown collects original interviews, journals, letters, photographs, accounts from previous biographies, newspapers from the period, and Williams' own writing to establish how the time Williams spent in Provincetown shaped him for the rest of his life. The book identifies major themes in Williams' work that derive from his experience in Provincetown, in particular the necessity of recollection given the short season of love. The book also connects Williams mature theatrical experiments to his early friendships with Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner and the German performance artist Valeska Gert. Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, based on several years of extensive research and interviews, includes previously unpublished photographs, previously unpublished poetry, and anecdotes by those who were there.
Download or read book Tony Kushner in Conversation written by Tony Kushner and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The premier American playwright of this decade speaks out about art, sexuality, and social justice
Download or read book Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry written by Mollie Godfrey and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-12-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention Recipient of the Modern Language Association Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship Spanning from the debut of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in 1959 to her early death from cancer in January 1965, Lorraine Hansberry’s short stint in the public eye changed the landscape of American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry (1930–1965) became both the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the first to win the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Resonating deeply with the aims of the civil rights movement, Raisin also ushered in a new era of Black representation on the stage and screen, displacing the cartoonish stereotypes that were the remnants of blackface minstrelsy in favor of complex three-dimensional portrayals of Black characters and Black life. Hansberry’s public discourse in the aftermath of Raisin’s success also disrupted mainstream critical tendencies to diminish the work of Black artists, helping pave the way for future work by Black playwrights. Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry is the first volume to collect all of her substantive interviews in one place, including many radio and television interviews that have never before appeared in print. The twenty-one pieces collected here—ranging from just before the Broadway premiere of A Raisin in the Sun to less than six months before Hansberry’s death—offer an incredible window into Hansberry’s aesthetic and political thought. In these conversations, Hansberry explores many of the questions most often put to Black writers of the mid-twentieth century—including everything from her thinking about the relationship between art and protest, universality and particularity, and realism and naturalism, to her sense of the relationship between Black intellectuals and the Black masses, integration and Black Nationalism, and African American and Pan-African liberation. Taken together, these interviews reveal the insight, intensity, and eloquence that made Hansberry such a transformative figure in American letters.
Download or read book Everybody written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This modern riff on the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman follows Everybody (chosen from amongst the cast by lottery at each performance) as they journey through life’s greatest mystery—the meaning of living.
Download or read book Family Dysfunction in Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie written by Dedria Bryfonski and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tennessee Williams' 1944 play The Glass Menagerie centers around a family of three, Tom, Laura, and Amanda Wingfield, exploring what it means to share a household with people whose individual psychological eccentricities threaten to overwhelm the whole. Told retroactively in the format of a memory play, the protagonist, Tom, an aspiring poet by night and warehouse worker by night, introduces the audience to the conditions which led him to abandon his family in pursuit of his independence. This informative edition explores the themes of family dysfunction in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, providing readers with a critical look at the intersection of literature and sociology. The book includes an examination of Williams' life and influences and takes a hard look at key ideas related to the play, such as the role of guilt in family relationships and the breakdown of the American dream. Readers are also offered contemporary perspectives on family dysfunction through the discussion of toxic or overbearing parents and the effects of alcoholism on families.
