Tennessee Williams and the South / by Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Holditch, W. Kenneth.

Contributor:

Leavitt, Richard F.

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983--Knowledge and learning--Southern States.

Williams, Tennessee.

Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983.

Southern States.

Literature and society--Southern States--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

History.

Dramatists, American--20th century--Biography.

Dramatists, American.

Southern States--In literature.

Genre:

Biographies.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xiii, 111 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2002]

Summary:

Tennessee Williams remarked on several occasions that the farther South one went in America, the more congenial life became. Though he sojourned elsewhere, he embraced the South, the region of his birth, as his creative homeland. Few writers have been more closely connected with it than he. He wrote, he said, not only of the present but also of the past and of a South that had no counterpart anywhere else. Combining his words with pictures, this biographical album reveals the closeness of Williams with the American South. Although he roamed far, he never forgot the "more congenial climate" the South afforded him and his creativity. Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911 and lived there with his family till he was seven. Thomas Lanier Williams, who became "Tennessee," absorbed much of his creative material from this Mississippi home place. Many of his ancestors were distinguished Tennesseans, a fact in which he took considerable pride. Although he grew to maturity in St. Louis, it was to the South that he continually returned in his memory and in his imagination. It was in New Orleans and Key West that he chose to spend a large part of his later years. His characters -- Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke, and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire -- have outlived the southern past in which they had been at home. Unlike them, despite the South's industrial transformation, Williams always found the South his own. This book underscores that intimate connection by featuring photographs of people and places that influenced him. Enhanced with a long essay and captioned with quotations from Williams's plays, memoirs, and letters, more than one hundred pictures document the keen sense of place that he felt throughout his life and career.

Contents:

Introduction: A More Congenial Climate ix

A Dark, Wide World You Can Breathe In 3

Where You Hang Your Childhood 21

One of the Last Frontiers of Bohemia 57

En Avant 103.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

1578064104

OCLC:

48876482