Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams

Now in paperback--the riveting, revelatory, and sole authorized account of the critical first decades of Tennessee Williams' life. "A huge accomplishment. Lyle Leverich's Tom is thorough and passionate, an astonishing tale."--John Lahr, The New Yorker. BOMC & QPBC Selections. Photos. 644 pp. National publicity & ads.

Considered by many to be the greatest artist of the American theatre, Tennessee Williams has been described by those who knew him as shy and aggressive, lucid and manic, accessible and elusive, kind and cruel, but always enigmatic. Until now, little has been known of Williams's youth and the true forces that influenced and helped create the persona of Tennessee Williams. Lyle Leverich, chosen by the playwright himself as his biographer, has been given exclusive access to letters, diaries and journals, unpublished manuscripts, and family documents and has written the definitive biography of Williams's early life. Leverich takes us through Williams's largely unknown life from the young, introspective schoolboy through his stalled academic career, the early success of his writing, the confusion over his sexuality, the growing certainty of his talent, to the brink of fame with The Glass Menagerie. Tom tells the story of the "unknown" years of the playwright's life, before Tom, the person, was eclipsed by Tennessee, the celebrated persona.

Publishers Weekly

After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty but only slightly bloated first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich-who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's ``chosen biographer''-covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing-or avoiding it-at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a ``repressed puritan'' poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event-in this case, the opening of a remarkable play-this is an impressively argued biography. Even if you don't, it is a compulsively readable story. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)