Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh Audiobook

Quotes

• “Unsurpassable…An eloquent, spellbinding narrative that emerges as an instant classic.”

  — Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Washington: A Life

• “There’s never been an American critic like John Lahr. His writing exalts, honors, and dignifies the profession and, more importantly, the art.”

  — Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Angels in America

• “Splendid beyond words. It would be hard to imagine a more satisfying biography.”

  — Bill Bryson, New York Times bestselling author or At Home

• “Lahr has managed to capture the complex and at times contradictory qualities—the razor wit and gracious Southern charm, the bottomless drive and uncanny capacity for self-destruction—that characterized one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.”

  — USA Today

• “Raises the curtain on Tennessee Williams.”

  — Vanity Fair

• “A masterpiece.”

  — New Yorker

• “Offers plenty of backstage anecdotes and high private drama…But Mr. Lahr, ever the critic, keeps the plays themselves front and center…The book has already won enthusiastic advance notice…along with blurbs from a kick line of A-list ‘theatricals’ including Helen Mirren, John Guare, and Tony Kushner.”

  — New York Times

• “In his fascinating biography of, arguably, America’s finest playwright, John Lahr gives a sense of the ebb and flow of Tennessee Williams’s life, exercising a critic’s keen eye on the plays, a novelist’s gift for characterization, and a historian’s awareness of the way the changing American society colored his work. The result is almost as much a biography of the plays as of the playwright — a book that lets the life illuminate the work and the work illuminate the life…In Lahr’s telling, Williams changed the shape and the ambition of the American commercial theater with a body of work drawn from his inner life that resonated particularly well with the American mood from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Vietnam War.”

  — Washington Post

• “Excellent…A forceful claim for the playwright’s immortality.”

  — Boston Globe

• “Lahr’s expansive, polished, and keenly observed volume is a major work of American theater criticism and biography.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• “Writing with sympathy and insight, former New Yorker drama critic Lahr invests the Tennessee Williams of this brilliant new biography with the same vitality and honesty that the playwright used to bring his characters to life…Though Lahr acknowledges the successes of previous Williams scholars, his achievement is not likely to be surpassed.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “The tormented life of a celebrated American playwright…Lahr knows his subject intimately and portrays him with cleareyed compassion. Drawing on vast archival sources and unpublished manuscripts, as well as interviews, memoirs, and theater history, he fashions a sweeping, riveting narrative. There is only one word for this biography: superb.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “This is a masterpiece about a genius. Only John Lahr, with his perceptions about the theater, about writers, about poetry, and about people could have written this book. What a marvelous read.”

  — Helen Mirren, Academy Award-winning British actress

• “Swear-to-god, it’s the most original, insightful, thrilling biography I’ve ever read!”

  — Elizabeth Ashley, American actress