The kindness of strangers : the life of Tennessee Williams / by Donald Spoto.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spoto, Donald, 1941-2023.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983.

Williams, Tennessee.

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

Dramatists, American.

Genre:

Biographies.

Penn Provenance:

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

Physical Description:

2 unnumbered pages, xix pages, 1 unnumbered page, 409 pages, 1 unnumbered page, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

[First Da Capo Press edition].

Place of Publication:

[New York] : Da Capo Press, [1997]

Summary:

This is the first complete, critical biography of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of America's finest playwrights and the author of (among many important works) The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and the Night of the Iguana. Award-winning biographer Donald Spoto gives us not only a full and accurate account of Williams's life; he also reveals the intimate connections between the playwright's personal dramas and his remarkably autobiographical art. From his birth into a genteel Southern family, through his success, celebrity, and wealth, to his drug addictions, promiscuity, and creative struggles, Tennessee Williams lived a life as gripping as his plays. The Kindness of Strangers, based on Williams's own papers, his mother's diaries, and interviews with scores of friends, lovers, and professional associates, is, in the author's words, a portrait of "a man more disturbing, more dramatic, richer and more wonderful than any character he created".

Notes:

"First Da Capo Press edition 1997."

"This Da Capo Press paperback edition of 'The Kindness of Strangers' is an unabridged republication, with minor emendations, of the edition published in Boston in 1985."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 385-388) and index.

ISBN:

0306808056

9780306808050

OCLC:

36647819

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description