Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams
by Lyle Leverich
- Used
- Very Good
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Very Good/Very Good
- ISBN 10
- 0517702258
- ISBN 13
- 9780517702253
- Seller
-
Middlebury, Vermont, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
NY: Crown, 1995. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography. Record # 378817
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Details
- Bookseller
- Browsing Is Arousing (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 378817
- Title
- Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams
- Author
- Lyle Leverich
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- Very Good
- Edition
- 1st
- ISBN 10
- 0517702258
- ISBN 13
- 9780517702253
- Publisher
- Crown
- Place of Publication
- NY
- Date Published
- 1995
- Keywords
- Literature, Biography, , .
- Bookseller catalogs
- Literature;
Terms of Sale
Browsing Is Arousing
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About the Seller
Browsing Is Arousing
Biblio member since 2021
Middlebury, Vermont
About Browsing Is Arousing
From the founders of "Monroe Street Books", "Browsing is Arousing" is a strictly on-line antiquarian, rare, out-of-print & used books store. Our wide-range of inventory includes: Art, Children's Picture and Chapter, Exploration, Fiction, History, Illustrated, Literature, Mystery, Science Fiction, Photography, Performing Arts, Regional, Sciences and Sports.
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