The letters in the boxes depicted the mundane rhythms of Williams family life, but also described hospital stays and nervous breakdowns, the decision to have their sister Rose lobotomized, the years ...of struggling in anonymity, the intoxication of success and fame, the despair of a career in decline, the drug-fueled paranoia and recurring depression, and the family members' abiding love and respect for one another. Some of his manuscripts are there, too—The Red Devil Battery Sign, Moise and the World of Reason—strewn with insertions and revisions written on napkins stained with coffee and wine or on the backs of menus from ocean-liner crossings. How is it fair, the letter fairly screams, for Dakin, the "good son," who did everything by the book—graduated from college and law school, went to Harvard for an MBA, married, joined the armed forces, was a devout Catholic, wrote his own book—to be forever eclipsed by Tom, the dropout, hypochondriac, homosexual momma's boy whom Dad never liked? Maybe Williams knew where this would lead, not to a crime scene or to a murderer, but to a distracting postmortem for conspiracy theorists (not just Dakin), and a morbid fascination with the nature of his death rather than the character of his work. ________ December 19, 1975 Dearest Mother: I am somehow managing to keep up with the heaviest schedule of my career, with the aid of various jet planes.
Abstract
On 26 March 1980, Tennessee Williams premiered his final play on Broadway, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a biodrama based loosely on the lives and final days of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. ...As was his tradition, Williams wrote a pre-opening piece to accompany the opening that was intended for the theater section of the New York Times. On this occasion, the Times refused to publish the essay. Williams had been battling the newspaper's drama critics for over a decade, and the essay, embittered and oozing with self-pity, bears the wounds he had received from their repeated confrontations. Published here for the first time (the essay had been lost for over three decades), “Mending Sails by Candlelight” is a playwright's plea for sincere criticism on his play's own terms and not in comparison to his early great works, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Glass Menagerie (1945), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).
Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries compiles eight transcribed panels that were featured at The Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference, an annual event held each March in conjunction with the ...Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. This.
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