The Kindness Of Strangers: The Life Of Tennessee Williams

by Donald Spoto

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306808050
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	08/22/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Donald Spoto is the author of many books, among them internationally best-selling biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, and Ingrid Bergman. He lives in Beverly Hills, California.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Library Journal