A Life of William Inge
A Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph Ralph F. Voss,
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700604421
Edition: Paperback; 1990-09-01
Summary:
In the spring of 1973 one of the country's most successful
dramatists, William Inge, ran out of reasons to think he was any
good. He went into his garage one night and shut the door, seated
himself behind the wheel of his new car, and turned the key. By
morning he was dead. "Death makes us all innocent," Inge had written,
"and weaves all our private hurts and griefs and wrongs into the
fabric of time, and makes them a part of eternity." But William Inge
had it made, or so it seemed in 1962. He had written an unprecedented
string of Broadway hits: Picnic, Bus Stop, The Dark at the Top of the
Stairs, and Come Back, Little Sheba. All four plays had become
successful films featuring top Hollywood stars. Inge had received a
Pulitzer Prize for Picnic and an Academy Award for his screenplay,
Splendor in the Grass. Even his longtime friend and mentor, Tennessee
Williams, was envious of his success. Privately, Inge was miserable.
His long struggle with alcoholism and profound shame over his
homosexuality plagued him before, during, and after his decade of
great success. As criticism of his work intensified, Inge responded
with increasingly frantic attempts to please by "modernizing" his
writing. He abandoned the small-town characters and settings he knew
in favor of more lurid, urban subject matter. In the end, his
characters lost their authentic voices, and neither critics nor
audiences found his later work believable. In this first book-length
literary biography of Inge, Ralph Voss peels back the veneer of
public success and lays bare the private pain and isolation of the
man who was called America's first authentic midwestern playwright.
He draws upon interviews, memoirs, and unpublished manuscripts,
letters, and papers to show how Inge's unhappy life fueled the
struggles his plays depict.
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