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Beginning very cleverly on the eve of The Glass Menagerie’s premiere, he moves backward and forward in time, incorporating enough family and personal narratives to give us a sense of Williams – but, more importantly, to support his trenchant analysis of Williams’ work. In Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, Lahr thrillingly fills the gap.

I’ve never found a book that covered the full spectrum with depth and insight – till now. Some very good books – Lyle Leverich’s Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, for example – take up only part of the story. Yet much of the writing about Williams is problematic. In Lahr’s words, “In the more than thirty plays and seventy one-acts, written over six decades, Williams built a kingdom of the self, at once glorious and onerous.” And the connections between his life and his work run unusually deep. To my mind, Williams is not only America’s greatest playwright – he’s one of our greatest (most poetic, most insightful) writers in any genre. None of this, though, has kept biographers away (it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s even more writing about Williams than by him).

Williams’ private life was, if anything, less tidy than his professional one, with a cast of characters – family members adored and loathed, lovers who came and went, famous and infamous friends – as theatrical as any in his plays.Īnother challenge – Williams’ career began with far greater sparkle than it ended, a fact that John Lahr, in his revelatory new biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, tacitly acknowledges in calling his penultimate chapter, The Long Farewell. Williams sometimes explored a plot or characters across different genres – to understand The Glass Menagerie, it’s helpful to know Portrait of a Girl in Glass, the short story where he first took up the wrenching tale of Laura Wingfield. Many of these are unfamiliar some are short versions of works he continued to reshape later, often over long periods of time ( Something Cloudy, Something Clear – usually referred to as Williams’ last play, dating from 1981 – was based on a one-act he wrote 40 years before.) It’s dizzying even to keep track of the various titles – what started as Battle of Angels later became Orpheus Descending, and (still later, on film) The Fugitive Kind. In addition to the ten or so plays that are the source of Williams’ greatest fame, there are poems, short stories, memoirs, screenplays, letters (published and unpublished) and more. What a daunting biographical subject Tennessee Williams must be!įor starters, his oeuvre – surely one of the greatest in American theatre – is also one of the most sprawling, even messy.