The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennesee Williams

Book Synopsis: Drawing on a broad range of sources, Spoto weaves Williams's successes, failures, obsessions, and suffering into a "tightly woven chronicle" (LJ 5/1/85). "Spoto's readable biography corrects the…one-sided accounts in Williams's own memoirs and his brother Dakin's ‘intimate biography.’" This title is for both the serious theater scholar and lay reader alike.

Tom Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911. The son of a womanizing, hard-drinking father and an obsessively domineering mother, he sought refuge at an early age in a world of fantasy and stories shared with his sister and closest companion, Rose. By late adolescence, Tennessee Williams had determined on a career as a playwright and found subjects for powerful drama in the conflicts and heartbreak of his family, culminating in the lobotomy performed on the unstable Rose which left her trapped in a twilight world, unable to communicate. In 1945 "The Glass Menagerie", based on this tragedy, brought Williams instant acclaim and from then, at the age of 34, he was considered the greatest voice of the American theatre, producing such enduring successes as "Summer Smoke", "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Suddenly Last Summer" and "Night of the Iguana". At the same time, however, his bouts of excess and addiction to alcohol and pills, his homosexual promiscuity and his incessant travelling, combined with overwork to undermine his health and render the last 20 years of his life wretched and creatively barren. This biography is based on a study of the playwright’s published work, his private papers and those of his mother, as well as interviews with friends and colleagues.