Tennessee Williams: No Refuge but Writing

New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, 2018. First Edition. Paperback. New. NEW, paperback, 96 pages The book was published for an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in 2018.br />
Tennessee Williams dominated Broadway in the 1940s and 1950s with masterpieces such as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin RoofHis plays sent audiences "gowing to mad heights," and they brought him a "catastrophe of success" Published to accompany the exhibition Tennessee Williams: No Refugebut Writing at the Morgan Library & Museum, this publication illuminates the playwright's battle to find his voice Williams's plays-intimate, confessional, and autobiographical-emerged slowly from stories, poems, one-act plays, and journal fragments For Williams, writing was an indomitable need He found inspiration in his family and lovers, and mined his own life deeply-sometimes self-destructively-for his work, often identifying strongly with his heroines through whom he could explore a refracted and heterosexualized portrait of his own life: "I was and still am Blanche [although] God knows I have a Stanley in me, too," he wrote Williams, a lyric perfectionist, wrote every day and revised his work incessantly, changing lines even after a play had opened and returning to scripts long after a play had closed Writing was always his savior, his tormentor, his refuge.