This riveting biography gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, shedding light on Tennessee Williams' warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, and even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams' life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, and his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—this is both a compelling biography and an exploration of Williams’s plays and formidable characters.
John Lahr is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, where for more than two decades he was the magazine’s senior drama critic. A former theater critic at The Nation, The Village Voice, and British Vogue, among other publications, Lahr has published seventeen books on the theater and two novels, The Autograph Hound, and Hot to Trot. His book Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization won the 1992 Roger Machell Prize for best book on the performing arts. Lahr is a two-time winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
John Lahr is the son of the comedian Bert Lahr, whom he wrote about in his biography Notes on a Cowardly Lion. He lives in London.
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