Customer Reviews

The Kindness Of Strangers: The Life Of Tennessee Williams

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The last words of the book, "at last there was stillness," exemplify Spoto's ability to capture the chaos of this genius's life. Although the book is somewhat fast paced and races over portions of Williamss life, it is meticulously researched and digs up every facet of Tennessee Williams. Spoto reveals the glory days of the pulitzer prize winning playwright and the nightmare of his last two decades in which he watched success wane as fastidious critics, ignorantly demanding that Williams continue to deliver plays in the vein of Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named desire, beat him literally to death. One must have emotions of steel to get through the book's later chapters, in which Williams suffers a miserable descent into drug addiction and madness. Despite Williams's wealth and fame, the man lived a terribly difficult life. From his chaotic childhood to his drugged, alcoholic and lonely end, Williams's life was perhaps his greatest drama, as Spoto reveals.

Yes, Tennesee Williams signed some of his letters as "10." That's just one of the many things you'll learn from reading Spoto's 1985 biography of this famous American playwright. More complete, thorough and sympathetic biographies have been issued since this one, but Spoto's is still worth reading. It has the virtue of concision (it runs about 400 pages, which for a crowded life like Williams had isn't long), at least. I don't argue with Spoto's view that Williams lived a largely miserable life, sank into rampant substance abuse, and hurt most of the people who cared for him. By the time he died, he couldn't get a good review for any new play he wrote. No one in the theater world liked him. It took his death for his career to start to recover, but at this point the late plays are getting better-reviewed productions, and the scope of his entire achievement (including his work in fiction and poetry) is finally being assimilated. From this distance, the only American playwright of the 20th century who might be put into the same class is O'Neill. I would vote for Williams. Anyone who reads this book will have to be willing to take Spoto's unsympathetic reading of Williams's life. At times he lectures the dead subject of the book like a prim schoolmarm (he did the same in his Hitchcock biography). The book is still a gripping portrait of one of the greatest, and saddest, literary giants America has produced. I believe the tragedy of his genius rivals Poe's.

I read this book after it was recommended by a good friend of mine, Colby Kullmanm, who is an English professor at Ole Miss. Colby is an expert on Mr. Williams. I found the book to be very fair to Mr. Williams. It helps to explain the pain of his childhood, the many demons he fought as an adult, the pain of writing and rejection, and his humor. I would recommend the book to anyone that want to have a good general knowledge of Williams. It opened my eyes to the fact that all humans have faults - none of us is perfect.