The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced and several National Book Award Finalist books made the list. The works of John Lahr, Roz Chast, Marilynne Robinson, and Rabih Alameddine were all nominated and Claudia Rankine became the first National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist nominated in two categories: criticism and poetry.
In addition, Phil Klay, who won the National Book Award for his short-story collection Redeployment, will be awarded the John Leonard prize for the best debut book.
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr
The Leonard Lopate Show: The Hidden Drama in the Life of One of the Country’s Best Playwrights, Tennessee Williams
On Point: The Real Story Of Playwright Tennessee Williams
Longlisted for the National Book Award. 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.
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