Tom (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Lyle Leverich
- First Published: 1995
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1911-1945
- Setting: Chiefly Mississippi, Missouri, New York, New Orleans, and California
- Principal Characters: Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams III, Edwina Dakin Williams, Cornelius Coffin (C. C.) Williams, Rose Isabel Williams, Audrey Wood, James Laughlin
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Family or family life, Parents and children, Gay men, Homosexuality or homosexuals, Guilt, Incest, Fathers, Depression, mental, Loneliness, Drama or dramatists, Letters, Avant-garde, Plays or playwrights
- Locales: California, New York, New Orleans, LA, Mississippi, Missouri
Authorized by the dramatist five years before his death in 1983, Lyle Leverich’s Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams arrives as the first biographical study to draw extensively upon unpublished letters, as well as upon the journals and notebooks begun in 1936 that Williams termed the “emotional record” of his life. Yet even journals, like letters in which the writer can, chameleonlike, adopt a series of masks, may not necessarily present the naked truth. As Williams would admit, “These note- books despite their attempt at merciless candor . . . perhaps distort unfavorably...
[The entire page is 1922 words long]
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