Download or read book Understanding Tennessee Williams written by Alice Griffin and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Griffin offers an in-depth evaluation of the nine plays that established Tennessee Williams as America's greatest lyric dramatist. Describing him as the first playwright writing in English to combine full-blooded characters, theatricalism, and poetic dialogue, Griffin considers Williams both as a literary figure and as a stage innovator. Griffin analyzes the language, characters, dramatic effects, and staging of these classic plays, and she calls attention to Williams's unique gift for creating dialogue as lyrical poetry yet as authentic as everyday conversation. She reveals the importance of symbolism in his work, uncovers his often overlooked humor, and explains his insistence on "plastic" presentations. Griffin also chronicles the resistance that Williams met when he tried to bring his revolutionary staging ideas to the commercial theater. Griffin viewed the plays as originally staged and discussed them with the playwright, the directors, and the actors. From her association with these initial productions, Griffin shares her knowledge of Williams's frustration with the presentation of his work. She remedies what she considers to be misguided interpretations of those early productions by measuring the original stage productions against Williams's stated aims.
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 Blue Song written by Henry I. Schvey and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2021-06-04 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life and extraordinary literary and theatrical career in the place that he lived in longest, and called home longer than any other—St. Louis, Missouri. The question of this paradox lies at the heart of this book, an attempt not so much to correct the record about Williams’s well-chronicled dislike of the city, but rather to reveal how the city was absolutely indispensable to his formation and development both as a person and artist. Unlike the prevailing scholarly narrative that suggests that Williams discovered himself artistically and sexually in the deep South and New Orleans, Blue Song reveals that Williams remained emotionally tethered to St. Louis for a host of reasons for the rest of his life.
Download or read book The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007-04-17 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his unmistakable Mississippi drawl. Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams had never written a single play he would still be known as a distinguished poet. The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions’ founder James Laughlin, who initially presented some of Williams’ verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams’s poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright’s collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis. The CD included with this paperbook edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads," poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."
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 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 Tennessee Williams written by Ronald Hayman and published by Yale University Press UK Sr. This book was released on 1993 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the American playwright portrays him as a troubled artist who coped with his insecurities through the daily discipline of writing
Download or read book The Glass Menagerie written by Tennessee Willams and published by The Anglo Egyptian Bookshop. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hard Candy written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1954 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Theatre of Tennessee Williams written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1971 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.
Download or read book Collected Stories written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1994-04-17 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive collection establishes Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams’ Collected Stories combines the four short-story volumes published during Williams’ lifetime with previously unpublished or uncollected stories. Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."
Download or read book The Red Devil Battery Sign written by Tennessee Williams and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1988 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is William's symbol for the military-industrial complex and all the dehumanizing trends it represents from mindless cocktail party chatter to bribery of officials to assassination plots directed against those who won't play the game, to attempted coups by right-wing zealots.
Download or read book A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot written by Tennessee Williams and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1958 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cast ages.
Download or read book Spring Storm written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams's work.--World Literature Today
Download or read book Four Plays written by Tennessee Williams and published by Signet. This book was released on 1976 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology contains four of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's most brilliant works: Summer and Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer and Period of Adjustment. "The innocent and the damned, the lonely and the frustrated, the hopeful and the hopeless . . . (Williams) brings them all into focus with an earthy, irreverently comic passion".--Newsweek.
Download or read book The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia written by Philip Kolin and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 2004-03-30 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tennessee Williams is synonymous with 20th-century theatre. For nearly half a century, he wrote plays that transformed stages and amazed audiences around the world. This reference is a comprehensive guide to his life and works. Included are roughly 160 alphabetically arranged entries on topics related to Williams and his writings. Individual entries treat his works, his family members and acquaintances, places central to his writings, and such topics as music, race, religion, art, and politics. Entries cite works for further reading and are written by expert contributors, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Through roughly 160 alphabetically arranged entries, the encyclopedia identifies major figures in his life; names his characters and specifies their significance; summarizes his plays, stories, and poems; discusses his sources and publications; provides performance histories; and surveys important film adaptations. Entries are written by expert contributors and cite works for further reading, while the encyclopedia concludes with primary and secondary bibliographies.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams written by Matthew C. Roudané and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of thirteen original essays from a team of leading scholars in the field. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors cover a healthy sampling of Williams's works, from the early apprenticeship years in the 1930s through to his last play before his death in 1983, Something Cloudy, Something Clear. In addition to essays on such major plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among others, the contributors also consider selected minor plays, short stories, poems, and biographical concerns. The Companion also features a chapter on selected key productions as well as a bibliographic essay surveying the major critical statements on Williams.
