内容简介
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National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category
National Book Award Finalist
2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography
American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award
A Chicago Tribune ‘Best Books of 2014’
USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading
Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014
The definitive biography of America’s greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker.
John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation’s sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams’s warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.
With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams’s life―his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin―Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.
The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams’s relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life.
Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.
作者简介
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【作者简介】
约翰·拉尔（John Lahr，1941— ），担任《纽约客》戏剧评论家二十余年。创作了二十多部关于戏剧的著作。两次获得乔治·吉恩·内森戏剧批评奖，还是第一位荣获托尼奖的剧评人。
【译者简介】
张敏，哈尔滨工业大学（威海）语言文学学院教授，哈工大教学带头人，一直从事英美文学研究，主持国家社科项目“田纳西·威廉斯戏剧诗学研究”，曾赴美国纽约大学访学。已出版译著《古典哲学的趣味》等。
凌建娥，湖南株洲人，湖南工业大学外国语学院英语系副教授，南京大学英语语言文学博士，师从刘海平教授，主要从事戏剧研究。纽约大学帝势艺术学院戏剧系、纽约市立大学研究生学院西格尔戏剧研究中心访问学者。先后出版英文学术专著《苏珊·格拉斯佩尔戏剧的艺术塑性研究》，以及《概念与范畴》《戏剧教育：方法与实践》等译著四部。