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The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennesee Williams
Drawing on a broad range of sources, Spoto weaves Williams's successes, failures, obsessions, and suffering into a "tightly woven chronicle" (LJ 5/1/85). "Spoto's readable biography corrects the...one-sided accounts in Williams's own memoirs and his brother Dakin's `intimate biography.'" This title is for both the serious theater scholar and lay reader alike.
Tom Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911. The son of a womanizing, hard-drinking father and an obsessively domineering mother, he sought refuge at an early age in a world of fantasy and stories shared with his sister and closest companion, Rose. By late adolescence, Tennessee Williams had determined on a career as a playwright and found subjects for powerful drama in the conflicts and heartbreak of his family, culminating in the lobotomy performed on the unstable Rose which left her trapped in a twilight world, unable to communicate. In 1945 "The Glass Menagerie", based on this tragedy, brought Williams instant acclaim and from then, at the age of 34, he was considered the greatest voice of the American theatre, producing such enduring successes as "Summer Smoke", "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Suddenly Last Summer" and "Night of the Iguana". At the same time, however, his bouts of excess and addiction to alcohol and pills, his homosexual promiscuity and his incessant travelling, combined with overwork to undermine his health and render the last 20 years of his life wretched and creatively barren. This biography is based on a study of the playwright's published work, his private papers and those of his mother, as well as interviews with friends and colleagues.
Tom Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911. The son of a womanizing, hard-drinking father and an obsessively domineering mother, he sought refuge at an early age in a world of fantasy and stories shared with his sister and closest companion, Rose. By late adolescence, Tennessee Williams had determined on a career as a playwright and found subjects for powerful drama in the conflicts and heartbreak of his family, culminating in the lobotomy performed on the unstable Rose which left her trapped in a twilight world, unable to communicate. In 1945 "The Glass Menagerie", based on this tragedy, brought Williams instant acclaim and from then, at the age of 34, he was considered the greatest voice of the American theatre, producing such enduring successes as "Summer Smoke", "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Suddenly Last Summer" and "Night of the Iguana". At the same time, however, his bouts of excess and addiction to alcohol and pills, his homosexual promiscuity and his incessant travelling, combined with overwork to undermine his health and render the last 20 years of his life wretched and creatively barren. This biography is based on a study of the playwright's published work, his private papers and those of his mother, as well as interviews with friends and colleagues.
461 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2015
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About the author
Donald Spoto
62 books168 followersA prolific and respected biographer and theologian, Donald Spoto is the author of twenty published books, among them bestselling biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Alfred Hitchcock, Tennessee Williams, and Ingrid Bergman. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Donald Spoto earned his Ph.D. in theology at Fordham University. After years as a theology professor, he turned to fulltime writing. The Hidden Jesus: A New Life, published in 1999, was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "offering a mature faith fit for the new millennium." His successful biography of Saint Francis was published in 2002.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 12, 2017
This well written and thoroughly researched biography is an overwhelmingly compassionate look at the life of Tennessee Williams, arguably America's greatest playwright.
Donald Spoto does an amazing job of showing how the terrible tragedies of Tennessee's early life shaped his greatest masterpieces. He details the way the adored sister Rose was the only bright spot of the playwright's childhood, and how she gradually went insane in adolescence and was eventually institutionalized. There's a lot of grief for Rose in THE GLASS MENAGERIE and in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. He also shows how Tennessee's father was a brutal tyrant who ridiculed and humiliated his shy, not particularly masculine son. Both Stanley Kowalski and Big Daddy are clearly based on the author's real life father!
Spoto writes about Tennessee's later years with enormous understanding and compassion. For the last twenty years of his life Tennessee Williams was basically a full time alcoholic and drug addict, yet he never ceased trying to write new plays and regain his former greatness. Spoto hints that his fall from fame and his drug problems can indirectly be attributed to "the Sixties," which (in Spoto's opinion) were a time of excess and vulgarity with no redeeming features.
The great flaw of this book is the biographer's refusal to discuss Tennessee' relationship to the times he lived in. Williams spent his whole life writing about "the South," but it was never the ugly, brutal, bombing, lynching Jim Crow south of contemporary headlines and reality. Tennessee gained fame in a way not too different from Margaret Mitchell, selling a picturesque, charmingly shabby, poignantly defeated south that Yankees could enjoy without too much thought. Spoto never confronts this. He never attempts to explain what Tennessee Williams really thought about black people, about segregation, lynching, etc. There is no mention of the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. or anything else that happened in the Sixties, other than the easy availability of drugs. On race matters, Tennessee Williams gets a pass, even though he gloried in fake nostalgia for a genteel south that never really existed.
This failure is particularly glaring when you consider that Williams didn't actually grow up on a vast plantation somewhere in the Deep South, but in urban, industrial St. Louis. (His family moved there in 1918 when he was seven.) Spoto acknowledges (in one paragraph) that St. Louis in 1918 was as strictly segregated as Mississippi. He tactfully neglects to mention, however, that in 1917 St. Louis was the site of one of the most brutal, violent, and prolonged race riots of the 20th century. An entire middle class black neighborhood was burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt. (Duke Ellington wrote a song about it, too. "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.") As a little boy Tennessee Williams must have heard plenty of stories about what that was like. He must have heard plenty of people in his own neighborhood (like his father) talking (or indeed bragging) about the awful destruction they'd just brought about. But for Tennessee, only the dream is real. Only the South suffers.
And Spoto is happy to play along.
Donald Spoto does an amazing job of showing how the terrible tragedies of Tennessee's early life shaped his greatest masterpieces. He details the way the adored sister Rose was the only bright spot of the playwright's childhood, and how she gradually went insane in adolescence and was eventually institutionalized. There's a lot of grief for Rose in THE GLASS MENAGERIE and in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. He also shows how Tennessee's father was a brutal tyrant who ridiculed and humiliated his shy, not particularly masculine son. Both Stanley Kowalski and Big Daddy are clearly based on the author's real life father!
Spoto writes about Tennessee's later years with enormous understanding and compassion. For the last twenty years of his life Tennessee Williams was basically a full time alcoholic and drug addict, yet he never ceased trying to write new plays and regain his former greatness. Spoto hints that his fall from fame and his drug problems can indirectly be attributed to "the Sixties," which (in Spoto's opinion) were a time of excess and vulgarity with no redeeming features.
The great flaw of this book is the biographer's refusal to discuss Tennessee' relationship to the times he lived in. Williams spent his whole life writing about "the South," but it was never the ugly, brutal, bombing, lynching Jim Crow south of contemporary headlines and reality. Tennessee gained fame in a way not too different from Margaret Mitchell, selling a picturesque, charmingly shabby, poignantly defeated south that Yankees could enjoy without too much thought. Spoto never confronts this. He never attempts to explain what Tennessee Williams really thought about black people, about segregation, lynching, etc. There is no mention of the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. or anything else that happened in the Sixties, other than the easy availability of drugs. On race matters, Tennessee Williams gets a pass, even though he gloried in fake nostalgia for a genteel south that never really existed.
This failure is particularly glaring when you consider that Williams didn't actually grow up on a vast plantation somewhere in the Deep South, but in urban, industrial St. Louis. (His family moved there in 1918 when he was seven.) Spoto acknowledges (in one paragraph) that St. Louis in 1918 was as strictly segregated as Mississippi. He tactfully neglects to mention, however, that in 1917 St. Louis was the site of one of the most brutal, violent, and prolonged race riots of the 20th century. An entire middle class black neighborhood was burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt. (Duke Ellington wrote a song about it, too. "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.") As a little boy Tennessee Williams must have heard plenty of stories about what that was like. He must have heard plenty of people in his own neighborhood (like his father) talking (or indeed bragging) about the awful destruction they'd just brought about. But for Tennessee, only the dream is real. Only the South suffers.
And Spoto is happy to play along.
May 7, 2011
This year is the centennial of the birth of Tennessee Williams. For my birthday I got a copy of the two-volume Library of America complete works, and I'm going to try to make my way through it. Of course I've read or seen, either on stage or the film adaptations, most of his major works, but the man was astoundingly prolific.
To get started, I thought I'd read a biography to get my bearings. Donald Spoto, who is a biographer best known for writing about film and theater celebrities such as Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and others, wrote The Kindness of Strangers in 1985, just three years after Williams' death. It appears to be the only one-volume biography of Williams, and is a compact, largely no-frills affair, but does offer some cogent commentary about his works, and points out warts and all.
Williams was born in Mississippi but raised mostly in St. Louis. His father worked in the shoe business, and disapproved of his inclinations toward writing (Spoto has the delicious fact that while working in the shoe factory he befriended a man named Stanley Kowalski). He was devoted to his maternal grandparents. His grandfather was a minister, and lived well into Williams' years of fame, living with him in his home in Key west.
After struggling through college as a journalism major, Williams went to New York with no money and ended up meeting an agent named Audrey Wood, who believed in him. After a few promising misfires, he struck gold with The Glass Menagerie, followed that up with Summer and Smoke, which was misdirected in its Broadway debut, and was later acclaimed in a revival. Then came A Streetcar Named Desire, and Williams was known as America's greatest playwright, and its richest. Fifteen of his works ended up made into films, but he didn't like most of them. Spoto quotes a friend saying, "And once, when he heard that the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was playing--which he hated--he went downtown and said to the people on line for tickets, 'This movie will set the industry back fifty years! Go home.'"
Though he had many successes, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth, his last great play was in 1964, with Night of the Iguana. From then on he kept writing, but baffled critics and audiences. He began to grow bitter and paranoid, turning on Wood and several other friends. He seemed to wander the globe, flittering from Key West (I made a pilgrimage to his house, now called Rose Cottage, on one of my visits there) to New Orleans to Sicily. All the while, he was hopelessly hooked on drugs and alcohol.
What I took away most from the book was how incredibly sad a life he led. He was haunted by his sister Rose, who was lobotomized as a girl and kept in an institution (she outlived him). Spoto details all the mentions of Rose, either as a name or as a flower, in his works. Of course the most famous incarnation she makes is as Laura in The Glass Menagerie, which for my money is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking plays ever written.
Williams was a hypochondriac, always thinking he was dying and always saying his next play was his last, even as early as the 1940s. He took downers and speed, and washed them down with wine. When he died, at the age of 72, he choked on the cap from a bottle of pills. Spoto makes several references to Williams overwhelming sense of misery, perhaps this sums it up best: "He was withdrawing from work to the solace of drugs, and from people to the darkness of solitude. And with this unfortunate shift in the personal and professional bases of his life, a cycle of misery and despair and decreativity enveloped him through the end of the decade."
Is Tennesee Williams (Spoto covers the mystery surrounding his change of name--he was born Thomas Lanier Williams, but there is no definitive answer) America's greatest playwright? I don't know, but I can't argue against it. He has written about half a dozen true classics, and he was also a man who liked to shock his audience, covering taboo subjects like repressed homosexuality (Williams was homosexual, and didn't make much of a secret of it), castration, and cannibalism. But his plays were also tender and empathetic toward his characters, and if he lived a life of despair, it poured out through his words.
To get started, I thought I'd read a biography to get my bearings. Donald Spoto, who is a biographer best known for writing about film and theater celebrities such as Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and others, wrote The Kindness of Strangers in 1985, just three years after Williams' death. It appears to be the only one-volume biography of Williams, and is a compact, largely no-frills affair, but does offer some cogent commentary about his works, and points out warts and all.
Williams was born in Mississippi but raised mostly in St. Louis. His father worked in the shoe business, and disapproved of his inclinations toward writing (Spoto has the delicious fact that while working in the shoe factory he befriended a man named Stanley Kowalski). He was devoted to his maternal grandparents. His grandfather was a minister, and lived well into Williams' years of fame, living with him in his home in Key west.
After struggling through college as a journalism major, Williams went to New York with no money and ended up meeting an agent named Audrey Wood, who believed in him. After a few promising misfires, he struck gold with The Glass Menagerie, followed that up with Summer and Smoke, which was misdirected in its Broadway debut, and was later acclaimed in a revival. Then came A Streetcar Named Desire, and Williams was known as America's greatest playwright, and its richest. Fifteen of his works ended up made into films, but he didn't like most of them. Spoto quotes a friend saying, "And once, when he heard that the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was playing--which he hated--he went downtown and said to the people on line for tickets, 'This movie will set the industry back fifty years! Go home.'"
Though he had many successes, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth, his last great play was in 1964, with Night of the Iguana. From then on he kept writing, but baffled critics and audiences. He began to grow bitter and paranoid, turning on Wood and several other friends. He seemed to wander the globe, flittering from Key West (I made a pilgrimage to his house, now called Rose Cottage, on one of my visits there) to New Orleans to Sicily. All the while, he was hopelessly hooked on drugs and alcohol.
What I took away most from the book was how incredibly sad a life he led. He was haunted by his sister Rose, who was lobotomized as a girl and kept in an institution (she outlived him). Spoto details all the mentions of Rose, either as a name or as a flower, in his works. Of course the most famous incarnation she makes is as Laura in The Glass Menagerie, which for my money is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking plays ever written.
Williams was a hypochondriac, always thinking he was dying and always saying his next play was his last, even as early as the 1940s. He took downers and speed, and washed them down with wine. When he died, at the age of 72, he choked on the cap from a bottle of pills. Spoto makes several references to Williams overwhelming sense of misery, perhaps this sums it up best: "He was withdrawing from work to the solace of drugs, and from people to the darkness of solitude. And with this unfortunate shift in the personal and professional bases of his life, a cycle of misery and despair and decreativity enveloped him through the end of the decade."
Is Tennesee Williams (Spoto covers the mystery surrounding his change of name--he was born Thomas Lanier Williams, but there is no definitive answer) America's greatest playwright? I don't know, but I can't argue against it. He has written about half a dozen true classics, and he was also a man who liked to shock his audience, covering taboo subjects like repressed homosexuality (Williams was homosexual, and didn't make much of a secret of it), castration, and cannibalism. But his plays were also tender and empathetic toward his characters, and if he lived a life of despair, it poured out through his words.
November 25, 2013
It's a book I likely wouldn't have read had my mother not picked it up at a yard sale. It's a wonderful biography, capturing this brilliant, flawed man in all his glory and ignominy. Tennessee Williams' story is so sad, but his sadness was what made his plays compelling and his doom inevitable. He never could move past the tortures of his own life, and as he descended into addiction and decline, he lost his coherence. His was a grand life nonetheless, and the author captures it all brilliantly.
June 23, 2009
Tennessee Williams swam, then got his writing done, then moved to sex and drugs. There is a lesson here. Get the writing done first.
June 28, 2022
Very interesting. Williams was an unusual man. His trying upbringing and family troubles dominated all of his works to the point that the themes of his works become repetitive.
Mr. Spoto clearly researched his subject thoroughly. However, this particular subject, with his constant urge to travel, was no doubt a special challenge. After the description of many trips back and forth from New York to Europe, New Orleans, Key West, St Louis, California and on and on, this reader reached a limit. It may have been more effective to write something like:
"Mr. Williams made, in the year 19XX, xx trips to London, xx to Italy, xx to New Orleans, etc. He met with xxx, worked on creating or revising xxx, attended the opening of xxx."
This would work because the trips, to this reader, seemed remarkably similar and do not call for individual detailing. Reading the details of each trip by someone who rarely spent more than a month in one place is exhausting.
Mr. Spoto has thankfully left out most of the details of the more sordid episodes in William's life while indicating that there surely had been many. His reckless desire for dangerous liaisons was unquenchable.
The end of William's career and life was sad. Although there were a core group of people in his life who cared for and tried to help him, his descent into drug use altered his personality, alienating most of those; the rest he drove away angrily with false accusations.
Mr. Spoto clearly researched his subject thoroughly. However, this particular subject, with his constant urge to travel, was no doubt a special challenge. After the description of many trips back and forth from New York to Europe, New Orleans, Key West, St Louis, California and on and on, this reader reached a limit. It may have been more effective to write something like:
"Mr. Williams made, in the year 19XX, xx trips to London, xx to Italy, xx to New Orleans, etc. He met with xxx, worked on creating or revising xxx, attended the opening of xxx."
This would work because the trips, to this reader, seemed remarkably similar and do not call for individual detailing. Reading the details of each trip by someone who rarely spent more than a month in one place is exhausting.
Mr. Spoto has thankfully left out most of the details of the more sordid episodes in William's life while indicating that there surely had been many. His reckless desire for dangerous liaisons was unquenchable.
The end of William's career and life was sad. Although there were a core group of people in his life who cared for and tried to help him, his descent into drug use altered his personality, alienating most of those; the rest he drove away angrily with false accusations.
February 23, 2022
Life of Tennessee Williams by Donald Spoto
This was a very informative work about a great playwright named Tennessee Williams. I liked all the research the 1 into it because I love his place but I didn't know much about his life . It is really well written.
This was a very informative work about a great playwright named Tennessee Williams. I liked all the research the 1 into it because I love his place but I didn't know much about his life . It is really well written.
October 22, 2023
Beautiful, kind and truthful
Amazing and beautifully written. All I knew about Mr Williams was his plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire. I found this book fascinating.
Amazing and beautifully written. All I knew about Mr Williams was his plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire. I found this book fascinating.
November 20, 2024
I wanted to learn more about the life of Tennessee Williams, which apparently was quite interesting, but this book contained much more information than I was looking for and soon became a drag. I couldn't read more than 30%.
March 2, 2019
Published very soon after Williams's death. Interesting what he chose to include and what is not included for various reasons. Seems to be a good job especially with his early life.
March 8, 2019
YOU NEVER KNOW. What a life.
September 28, 2014
It's depressing to read a biography about a man who overdoses. About 2/3 of the way in, the story was getting pretty bleak. It wasn't totally the authors fault, I mean, you can't change history. But the way he wrote some things, "That was the last time that Tennessee was happy..." gave you little to look forward to in the coming chapters.
Overall, I feel like I learned lot about my hero, from intimate details to professional accomplishments. I want to pick up his plays and re-read them in this new light.
Overall, I feel like I learned lot about my hero, from intimate details to professional accomplishments. I want to pick up his plays and re-read them in this new light.
April 10, 2015
Biography of Tennessee Williams. Harrowing. His life after 1960 was all downhill in spite of great wealth (perhaps because of it). He drank and drugged himself to death like Hemingway, like Fitzgerald, like Capote, like Inge . . . . [Read TW's Notesbooks to get his own confessions about the matter.]
October 8, 2014
This seems searingly honest without being catty or glib. A fascinating look into the life of one of my favorite writers.
May 21, 2015
Excellent bio of Williams.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews