A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
|
|||
|
Date
and Place of birth: |
|||
|
Life and Works: Playwright, poet, and fiction writer, Tennessee Williams is widely considered the greatest Southern playwright and one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American drama. Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, the first son and second child of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Dakin Williams. His father was a shoe salesman and an emotionally absent parent. He came from a prestigious Tennessee family which included the state's first governor and first senator. His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of Southern Episcopal minister. The family lived for several years in Clarksdale, Mississippi, before moving to St. Louis in 1918. Williams had an older sister named Rose and a younger brother named Walter. Rose was emotionally and mentally unstable, and her illnesses had a great influence on Thomas's life and work. In 1929, Williams enrolled in the University of Missouri. Williams's Deep South accent and poverty made him a target of his schoolmates and earned him later from his university classmates the nickname 'Tennessee'. The family's lack of funds forced him to leave after a couple of years and take a job in the same shoe company that employed his father. Williams had started to write in his childhood and continued to produce short stories while still working at the factory. The strain was too much, and when his health broke down, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Memphis. He recovered there and during these years he continued to write. Williams went back to school and in 1938 received at the age of 27 his B.A. degree from University of Iowa, where his Spring Storm was presented despite unfavorable reaction of Professor E.C. He then moved to New Orleans, where he changed his name to Tennessee. Having struggled with his sexuality all through his youth, he now fully entered gay life, with a new name, a new home, and promising talent. In 1939 he won a prize for American Blues, a collection of one-act plays. As the second World War loomed over the horizon, Williams found a bit of fame when he won the Group Theater prize of $100 for American Blues and received a $1,000 Rockefeller grant in 1939. In 1940, Battle of Angels (later rewritten as Orpheus Descending), his first full-length and professionally produced play, failed miserably. 1944-1945 brought a great turning point in his life and career: The Glass Menagerie was produced in Chicago to great success, and shortly afterward was a smash hit on Broadway. Containing autobiographical elements from both his days in St. Louis as well as from his family's past in Mississippi, the play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award as the best play of the season. Following the critical acclaim over The Glass Menagerie, over the next eight years he found homes for A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real on Broadway. His play A Streetcar Named Desire won a Pulizer Prize, and established him as an major American dramatist. It traced the decline and fall a Southern woman, Blance Du Bois. The play was made into a film, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando in his breakthrough role as Stanley Kowalski. Vivien Leigh hated Brando's slobbish behaviour on the set which, as a Method actor, mirrored his character's behaviour. Around this time, Williams met Frank Merlo. The two fell in love, and the young man became Williams' romantic partner until Merlo's untimely death in 1961. He was a steadying influence on Williams, who suffered from depression and lived in fear that he, like his sister Rose, would go insane. These years were some of Williams'most productive. His plays were a great success in the United States and abroad, and he was able to write works that were well-received by critics and popular with audiences: The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), about the moral decay of a Southern family, and Night of the Iguana (1961), filmed in 1964, among many others. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Williams his second Pulitzer Prize. Several of his plays were successfully transferred to the screen. Among Williams's own screenplays the most important was Baby Doll (1956), directed by Elia Kazan. In the story Silva Vacarro seeks revenge and aims to seduce Archie's child bride (Carroll Baker). The Legion of Decency railed against the film, in large part for its portrayal of an unconsummated marriage. Baker's baby-doll pyjamas created a fashion. He gave American theatergoers unforgettable characters, an incredible vision of life in the South, and a series of powerful portraits of the human condition. He was deeply interested in something he called "poetic realism," the use of everyday objects, which, seen repeatedly and in the right contexts, become imbued with symbolic meaning. His plays, for their time, also seemed preoccupied with the extremes of human brutality and sexual behavior: madness, rape, incest, nymphomania, as well as violent and fantastic deaths. As an artist Williams used his personal past, his own alcoholism and homosexuality, and his family and friends to provide subjects and characters for his plays, stories and novels. Exceptionally Williams set the story of his novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) in Rome. The protagonist, Mrs Stone, is recently widowed and settles in Rome where she starts an affair with the young and expensive Paolo. The sixties brought hard times for Tennessee Williams. He had become dependent on drugs, and the problem only grew worse after the death of Frank Merlo in 1961. Merlo's death from lung cancer sent Williams into a deep depression that lasted ten years. Williams was also insecure about his work, which was sometimes of inconsistent quality, and he was violently jealous of younger playwrights. In 1969 he spent two months on a detoxification program, designed to free him from prolonged dependency on alcohol, amphetamines, and barbiturates. From this period arose In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, which dealt with the difficulty of creating a work of art. The Two Character Play (Out Cry, 1973), portraying the author's self-doubt and alcoholism, was a quick failure on Broadway in 1973. Williams's frank Memoirs appeared in 1975. His final play, A House Not Meant to Stand, had its premiere at the Goodman Theater of Chicago in 1982. Williams died from choking after a heavy night of drinking on February 25, 1983, at the Hotel Elysée in New York City. |
www.AbeBooks.co.uk - find more than 110 million out-of-print books worldwide. |
||
|
Selected works:
Bibliography:
|
|||
|
|||
Descargue aquí nuestros buscadores de libros