National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014' USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Like an alchemist, Tennessee would dip his pen in reality and make fiction out of it. This journey through his life focuses on the influence of specific people and places on selected works.

Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors takes a critical look at these eleven actors and their roles, bonded by their sustained artistic and professional association with Williams, specifically the success, and sometimes failure, of their interpretations of his characters for the screen. The results include some of the more remarkable performances in movie history, from Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire to Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo and Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth. DiLeo takes you through the entire careers of these eleven indelible stars, while giving his main attention to their Williams performances. From the underrated (Joanne Woodward in The Fugitive Kind, Madeleine Sherwood in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) to the overrated (Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Tennessee Williams and Company takes an entertaining and intensely detailed ride alongside some of the most inexhaustibly fascinating actors and actresses of our screen heritage, each of them challenged by the unforgettable characters of the one and only Tennessee Williams.

Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams's notebooks follow his growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments.

All of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his unmistakable Mississippi drawl. Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams had never written a single play he would still be known as a distinguished poet. The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions’ founder James Laughlin, who initially presented some of Williams’ verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams’s poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright’s collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis. The CD included with this paperbook edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads," poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."

Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carre is not emotion recollected in tranquillity, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright's own 1938-39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes its form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants of his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carre: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York making a last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love -- both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, an education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that "writers are shameless spies," who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget.