22- ] American Literature - Raymond Chandler

 22- ] American Literature

Raymond Chandler 1888 – 1959

Raymond Chandler was a British-American novelist who wrote several screenplays and short stories. He published seven novels during his lifetime. The first, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. An eighth, Poodle Springs, unfinished at his death, was completed by another great crime writer, Robert B Parker. Six of Chandler’s novels have been made into films, some more than once.

Raymond Thornton Chandler, (born July 23, 1888, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died March 26, 1959, La Jolla, California), American author of detective fiction, the creator of the private detective Philip Marlowe, whom he characterized as a poor but honest upholder of ideals in an opportunistic and sometimes brutal society in Los Angeles.

From 1896 to 1912 Chandler lived in England with his mother, a British subject of Irish birth. Although he was an American citizen and a resident of California when World War I began in 1914, he served in the Canadian army and then in the Royal Flying Corps (afterward the Royal Air Force). Having returned to California in 1919, he prospered as a petroleum company executive until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when he turned to writing for a living. His first published short story appeared in the “pulp” magazine Black Mask in 1933. From 1943 he was a Hollywood screenwriter. Among his best-known scripts were for the films Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951), the last written in collaboration with Czenzi Ormonde.

Chandler completed seven novels, all with Philip Marlowe as hero: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953), and Playback (1958). Among his numerous short-story collections are Five Murderers (1944) and The Midnight Raymond Chandler (1971). The most popular film versions of Chandler’s work were Murder, My Sweet (1944; also distributed as Farewell, My Lovely), starring Dick Powell, and The Big Sleep (1946), starring Humphrey Bogart, both film noir classics.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.

At least three of Chandler's novels have been regarded as masterpieces, including Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Four of his novels appear on the British-based Crime Writers Association Poll (1990) of the best 100 crime fiction novels ever published.

As a writer

In straitened financial circumstances during the Great Depression, Chandler turned to his latent writing talent to earn a living, teaching himself to write pulp fiction by analyzing and imitating a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner. Chandler's first professional work, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933. According to genre historian Herbert Ruhm, "Chandler, who worked slowly and painstakingly, revising again and again, had taken five months to write the story. Erle Stanley Gardner could turn out a pulp story in three or four days—and turned out an estimated one thousand."

His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, featuring the detective Philip Marlowe, speaking in the first person. In 1950, Chandler described in a letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, why he began reading pulp magazines and later wrote for them:

Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.

His second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), became the basis for three movie versions adapted by other screenwriters, including the 1944 film Murder My Sweet, which marked the screen debut of the Marlowe character, played by Dick Powell (whose depiction of Marlowe was applauded by Chandler). Literary success and film adaptations led to a demand for Chandler himself as a screenwriter. He and Billy Wilder co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944), based on James M. Cain's novel of the same title. The noir screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. Said Wilder, "I would just guide the structure and I would also do a lot of the dialogue, and he (Chandler) would then comprehend and start constructing too." Wilder acknowledged that the dialogue which makes the film so memorable was largely Chandler's.

Chandler's only produced original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia (1946). He had not written a denouement for the script and, according to producer John Houseman, Chandler concluded he could finish the script only if drunk, with the assistance of round-the-clock secretaries and drivers, which Houseman agreed to. The script gained Chandler's second Academy Award nomination for screenplay.

Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), an ironic murder story based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, which he thought implausible. Chandler clashed with Hitchcock and they stopped talking after Hitchcock heard Chandler had referred to him as "that fat bastard". Hitchcock made a show of throwing Chandler's two draft screenplays into the studio trash can while holding his nose, but Chandler retained the lead screenwriting credit along with Czenzi Ormonde.

In 1946, the Chandlers moved to La Jolla, an affluent coastal neighborhood of San Diego, California, where Chandler wrote two more Philip Marlowe novels, The Long Goodbye and his last completed work, Playback. The latter was derived from an unproduced courtroom drama screenplay he had written for Universal Studios.

Four chapters of a novel, unfinished at his death, were transformed into a final Philip Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs, by the mystery writer and Chandler admirer Robert B. Parker, in 1989. Parker shares the authorship with Chandler. Parker subsequently wrote a sequel to The Big Sleep entitled Perchance to Dream, which was salted with quotes from the original novel. Chandler's final Marlowe short story, circa 1957, was entitled "The Pencil". It later provided the basis of an episode of the HBO miniseries (1983–86), Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, starring Powers Boothe as Marlowe.

In 2014, "The Princess and the Pedlar" (1917), a previously unknown comic operetta, with libretto by Chandler and music by Julian Pascal, was discovered among the uncatalogued holdings of the Library of Congress. The work was never published or produced. It has been dismissed by the Raymond Chandler estate as "no more than… a curiosity." A small team under the direction of the actor and director Paul Sand is seeking permission to produce the operetta in Los Angeles.

Later life and death

Cissy Chandler died in 1954, after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter her cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.

After Cissy's death, Chandler's loneliness worsened his propensity for clinical depression; he returned to drinking alcohol, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of his writing suffered.[8] In 1955, he attempted suicide. In The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, Judith Freeman says it was "a cry for help," given that he called the police beforehand, saying he planned to kill himself. Chandler's personal and professional life were both helped and complicated by the women to whom he was attracted, notably Helga Greene (his literary agent), Jean Fracasse (his secretary), Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's widow), and Natasha Spender (Stephen Spender's wife). Chandler regained his U.S. citizenship in 1956, while retaining his British rights.

After a respite in England, he returned to La Jolla. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia (according to the death certificate) in 1959. Helga Greene inherited Chandler's $60,000 estate, after prevailing in a 1960 lawsuit filed by Fracasse contesting Chandler's holographic codicil to his will.

Chandler is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, in San Diego, California. As Frank MacShane noted in his biography, The Life of Raymond Chandler, Chandler wished to be cremated and placed next to Cissy in Cypress View Mausoleum. Instead, he was buried in Mount Hope, because he had left no funeral or burial instructions.

On February 14, 2011, Cissy's ashes were conveyed from Cypress View to Mount Hope and interred under a new grave marker above Chandler's, as they had wished. About 100 people attended the ceremony, which included readings by the Rev. Randal Gardner, Powers Boothe, Judith Freeman and Aissa Wayne. The shared gravestone reads, "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts", a quotation from The Big Sleep. Chandler's original gravestone, placed by Jean Fracasse and her children, is still at the head of his grave; the new one is at the foot.

Views on pulp fiction

In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of many of his short stories, Chandler provided insight on the formula for the detective story and how the pulp magazines differed from previous detective stories:

The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.

Chandler also described the struggle that writers of pulp fiction had in following the formula demanded by the editors of the pulp magazines:

As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.

Critical reception

Critics and writers, including W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming, greatly admired Chandler's prose. In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming said that Chandler offered "some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today". Contemporary mystery writer Paul Levine has described Chandler's style as the "literary equivalent of a quick punch to the gut".Chandler's swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett, but his sharp and lyrical similes are original: "The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel"; "He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips"; "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts"; "I went back to the seasteps and moved down them as cautiously as a cat on a wet floor"; "He was crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him." Chandler's writing redefined the private eye fiction genre, led to the coining of the adjective "Chandleresque", and inevitably became the subject of parody and pastiche. Yet the detective Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical tough guy, but a complex, sometimes sentimental man with few friends, who attended university, who speaks some Spanish and sometimes admires Mexicans and Blacks, and who is a student of chess and classical music. He is a man who refuses a prospective client's fee for a job he considers unethical.

The high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, he wrote, "The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time."

Although his work enjoys general acclaim today, Chandler has been criticized for certain aspects of his writing. The Washington Post reviewer Patrick Anderson described his plots as "rambling at best and incoherent at worst" (notoriously, even Chandler did not know who murdered the chauffeur in The Big Sleep) and Anderson criticized Chandler's treatment of black, female, and homosexual characters, calling him a "rather nasty man at times". Anderson nevertheless praised Chandler as "probably the most lyrical of the major crime writers".

Chandler's short stories and novels are evocatively written, conveying the time, place and ambiance of Los Angeles and environs in the 1930s and 1940s. The places are real, if pseudonymous: Bay City is Santa Monica, Gray Lake is Silver Lake, and Idle Valley a synthesis of wealthy San Fernando Valley communities.

Playback is the only one of his novels not to have been cinematically adapted. Arguably the most notable adaptation is The Big Sleep (1946), by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. William Faulkner was a co-writer of the screenplay. Chandler's few screenwriting efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved stylistically and thematically influential on the American film noir genre. Notable for its revised take on the Marlowe character, transplanting the novel to the 1970s, is Robert Altman's 1973 neo-noir adaptation of The Long Goodbye.

Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field.

In popular culture

British songwriter Robyn Hitchcock paid homage to Chandler in the song "Raymond Chandler Evening" on the 1986 album Element of Light.

In the 11th issue of the influential Cyberpunk fanzine Cheap Truth, Vincent Omniaveritas conducted a fictitious interview with Chandler. The interview opines that Chandler's views towards the potential for respectability in pulp and genre fiction could also be applied to Science Fiction, specifically the Cyberpunk movement. It also derides Chandler's now-famous 1953 caricature of pulp Science Fiction. In the 2012 documentary, The Doors: Mr. Mojo Risin'- The Story of L.A. Woman, keyboardist Ray Manzarek describes Jim Morrison's lyrics to L.A. Woman: “Another lost angel in the city of night.” “The lyrics were so good. So Raymond Chandler, so Nathanael West, so 1930s, '40s, dark seamy side of Los Angeles. A place where Jim would easily go”.

In the season 4 (1993) of the TV series Northern Exposure, episode 16 starts with Chris reading to Ed a book with visible cover showing "Midnight - Raymond Chandler" while sitting in the Brick bar in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. Chris reads a passage from a book about the hot dry unnerving desert wind which causes people to act unexpectedly aggressively. The episode itself has a similar premise, namely, the "bad wind" blows through Cicely. After hearing the passage, Ed, impressed, utters "Whoa". Chris winks and says:"Raymond Chandler!"

In season 4, episode 18 of the sitcom Friends, during a debate over whether or not to name one of Phoebe's triplets "Chandler" or "Joey," Joey challenges Chandler to "name one famous person named Chandler." Chandler replies with "Raymond Chandler," to which Joey responds, "Someone you didn't make up!"

The popular Japanese superhero show Kamen Rider referenced Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye in the 2009 series Kamen Rider W. Kamen Rider W is a story of two detectives, Shotaro Hidari and Phillip, who become one when they transform into W, and battle criminals who are powered by drug-like USB flash drives called Gaia Memories. Phillip is named after Philip Marlowe; his name was chosen by Narumi Soukichi, Shotaro Hidari's mentor and fan of Chandler's The Long Goodbye. Many episodes of the show reference the hard-boiled style featured in Chandler's works. The Japanese version of the book can be seen prominently in "Kamen Rider X Kamen Rider W & Decade Movie Taisen 2010" as well as throughout the TV series on Shotaro's shelf, next to his desk where he writes his memoirs of cases in a wannabe hard-boiled, half-boiled style.

In the video game Cyberpunk 2077, there is a side quest called Raymond Chandler Evening, in which the protagonist follows the wife of a client who is suspected of cheating, all while the quest is narrated like a private eye from an old noir film.

Works by Raymond Chandler

Novels       

The Big SleepFarewell, My LovelyThe High WindowThe Lady in the LakeThe Little SisterThe Long GoodbyePlaybackPoodle Springs (unfinished)

Characters

Philip Marlowe

Short stories and collections  

"Nevada Gas""Smart-Aleck Kill"The Simple Art of MurderKiller in the Rain

Non-fiction

Raymond Chandler Speaking

Screenplays

Double IndemnityAnd Now TomorrowThe UnseenThe Blue DahliaStrangers on a TrainPlayback

Film adaptations

Time to Kill (1942)The Falcon Takes Over (1942)Murder, My Sweet (1944)The Big Sleep (1946)Lady in the Lake (1947)The Brasher Doubloon (1947)Marlowe (1969)The Long Goodbye (1973)Farewell, My Lovely (1975)The Big Sleep (1978)Poodle Springs (1998)

TV adaptations  

"The Big Sleep" (1950)"The Long Goodbye" (1954)Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (1983–1986)

21- ] American Literature - Ernest Hemingway

 21- ] American Literature 

Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961

Ernest Hemingway was a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. More works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously.

Ernest Hemingway, in full Ernest Miller Hemingway, (born July 21, 1899, Cicero [now in Oak Park], Illinois, U.S.—died July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho), American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century.

Agnes von Kurowsky and Ernest Hemingway

The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He was educated in the public schools and began to write in high school, where he was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. On graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a less-sheltered environment, he did not enter college but went to Kansas City, where he was employed as a reporter for the Star. He was repeatedly rejected for military service because of a defective eye, but he managed to enter World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry him. These were experiences he was never to forget.

Ernest Hemingway at the Finca Vigia, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, 1953. Ernest Hemingway American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Learn about Ernest Hemingway's short story “My Old Man” and his time as an expatriate in Paris

After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing, for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other American writers in Paris—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound—he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1925 his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was published in New York City; it was originally released in Paris in 1924.

In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and Spain—members of the postwar Lost Generation, a phrase that Hemingway scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him to the limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life. Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American writer Sherwood Anderson’s book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.

Ernest Hemingway in Havana

The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the postwar years. He remained based in Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933. Among his finest stories are “The Killers,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” At least in the public view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works. Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with war story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I, the American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation after being wounded. She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his post. Henry deserts during the Italians’ disastrous retreat after the Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the border into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, and Henry is left desolate at the loss of the great love of his life.

Hemingway aboard his boat

Hemingway’s love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933–34 in the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he purchased a house in Key West, Florida, and bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great Depression.

By now Spain was in the midst of civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war, he purchased Finca Vigía (“Lookout Farm”), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba, and went to cover another war—the Japanese invasion of China.

The harvest of Hemingway’s considerable experience of Spain in war and peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in preference to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all his books as measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most of the novel concerns Jordan’s relations with the varied personalities of the band, including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue, flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by the civil war. Jordan’s mission is to blow up a strategic bridge near Segovia in order to aid a coming Republican attack, which he realizes is doomed to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he blows up the bridge but is wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave him behind, where he prepares a last-minute resistance to his Nationalist pursuers.

Ernest Hemingway hunting in Kenya

All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war—in A Farewell to Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the comradeship it creates—and, as World War II progressed, he made his way to London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6, 1944). Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He also participated in the liberation of Paris, and, although ostensibly a journalist, he impressed professional soldiers not only as a man of courage in battle but also as a real expert in military matters, guerrilla activities, and intelligence collection.

Ernest Hemingway in Kenya

Following the war in Europe, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again. He also traveled widely, and, on a trip to Africa, he was injured in a plane crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home. This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically praised as his previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the story of a professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice, had been damned.

Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro

By 1960 Hemingway had left Cuba and settled in Ketchum, Idaho. (He expressed his belief in what he called the “historical necessity” of the Cuban Revolution; his attitude toward its leader, Fidel Castro, who had taken power in 1959, varied.) He tried to lead his life and do his work as before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had been married four times: to Hadley Richardson in 1921 (divorced 1927), Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927 (divorced 1940), Martha Gellhorn in 1940 (divorced 1945), and Mary Welsh in 1946. He had fathered three sons: John Hadley Nicanor (“Bumby”), with Hadley, born in 1923; Patrick, with Pauline, in 1928; and Gregory, also with Pauline, in 1931.

Hemingway left behind a substantial amount of manuscript, some of which has been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of his years in Paris (1921–26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964. Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas growing directly out of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of Havana during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in 1970.

Hemingway’s characters plainly embody his own values and view of life. The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as “the Hemingway code.” To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show “grace under pressure” and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.

Hemingway’s prose style was probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. These sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of conveying great irony through understatement. Hemingway’s use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural-sounding. The influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written, particularly from the 1930s through the ’50s.

A consummately contradictory man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors of the 20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion.

20-] American Literature - Arthur Miller

20- ] American Literature

Arthur Miller 1915 – 2005 

Arthur Miller was a playwright and ‘great man’ of American theatre, which he championed throughout his long life. His many dramas were among the most popular by American authors and several are considered to be among the best American plays, among them the classics, The Crucible, All My Sons, A View from the Bridge and, above all, the iconic American drama, Death of a Salesman. He also wrote film scripts, notably the classic, The Misfits.

Arthur Miller, in full Arthur Asher Miller, (born October 17, 1915, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 10, 2005, Roxbury, Connecticut), American playwright, who combined social awareness with a searching concern for his characters’ inner lives. He is best known for Death of a Salesman (1949).

Miller was shaped by the Great Depression, which brought financial ruin onto his father, a small manufacturer, and demonstrated to the young Miller the insecurity of modern existence. After graduation from high school he worked in a warehouse. With the money he earned he attended the University of Michigan (B.A., 1938), where he began to write plays. His first public success was with Focus (1945; film 1962 [made-for-television]), a novel about anti-Semitism. All My Sons (1947; film 1948), a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials that strongly reflects the influence of Henrik Ibsen, was his first important play. It won Miller a Tony Award, and it was his first major collaboration with the director Elia Kazan, who also won a Tony.

Miller’s next play, Death of a Salesman, became one of the most famous American plays of its period. It is the tragedy of Willy Loman, a man destroyed by false values that are in large part the values of his society. For Miller, it was important to place “the common man” at the centre of a tragedy. As he wrote in 1949 :

The quality in such plays [i.e., tragedies] that does shake us…derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is as strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best.

Miller had been exploring the ideas underlying Death of a Salesman since he was a teenager, when he wrote a story about a Jewish salesman; he also drew on memories of an uncle. He wrote the play in 1948, and it opened in New York City, directed by Kazan, in February 1949. The play won a Tony Award for best play and a Pulitzer Prize for drama, while Miller and Kazan again each won individual Tonys, as author and director respectively. The play was later adapted for the screen (1951 and several made-for-television versions) and was revived several times on Broadway.

Miller based The Crucible (1953) on the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692–93, a series of persecutions that he considered an echo of the McCarthyism of his day, when investigations of alleged subversive activities were widespread. Though not as popular as Death of a Salesman, it won a Tony for best play. It was also adapted numerous times for film and television. In 1956, when Miller was himself called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to name people he had seen 10 years earlier at an alleged communist writers’ meeting. He was convicted of contempt but appealed and won.

A Memory of Two Mondays and another short play, A View from the Bridge, about an Italian-American longshoreman whose passion for his niece destroys him, were staged on the same bill in 1955. (A year later A View from the Bridge was performed in a revised, longer form.) After the Fall is concerned with failure in human relationships and its consequences, large and small, by way of McCarthyism and the Holocaust; it opened in January 1964, and it was understood as largely autobiographical, despite Miller’s denials. Incident at Vichy, which began a brief run at the end of 1964, is set in Vichy France and examines Jewish identity. The Price (1968) continued Miller’s exploration of the theme of guilt and responsibility to oneself and to others by examining the strained relationship between two brothers. He directed the London production of the play in 1969.

The Archbishop’s Ceiling, produced in Washington, D.C., in 1977, dealt with the Soviet treatment of dissident writers. The American Clock, a series of dramatic vignettes based on Studs Terkel’s Hard Times (about the Great Depression), was produced at the 1980 American Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Miller’s later plays included The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991), Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998), and Resurrection Blues (2002).

Miller also wrote a screenplay, The Misfits, for his second wife, the actress Marilyn Monroe; they were married from 1956 to 1961. The Misfits, released in 1961, was directed by John Huston and also starred Clark Gable; its filming served as the basis for Miller’s final play, Finishing the Picture (2004). I Don’t Need You Any More, a collection of his short stories, appeared in 1967 and a collection of theatre essays in 1977. His autobiography, Timebends, was published in 1987. In 2001 Miller received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film.

In the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Profoundly influenced by the Depression and the war that immediately followed it, Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche. His probing dramas proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times, allowing people an honest view of the direction the country had taken.

After graduating, Miller returned to New York, where he worked as a freelance writer. In 1944, his first play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck”, opened to horrible reviews. A story about an incredibly successful man who is unhappy with that success, “The Man Who Had All The Luck” was already addressing the major themes of Miller’s later work. In 1945, Miller published a novel, FOCUS, and two years later had his first play on Broadway. “All My Sons,” a tragedy about a manufacturer who sells faulty parts to the military in order to save his business, was an instant success. Concerned with morality in the face of desperation, “All My Sons” appealed to a nation having recently gone through both a war and a depression.

Only two years after the success of “All My Sons,” Miller came out with his most famous and well-respected work, “Death of a Salesman.” Dealing again with both desperation and paternal responsibility, “Death of a Salesman” focused on a failed businessman as he tries to remember and reconstruct his life. Eventually killing himself to leave his son insurance money, the salesman seems a tragic character out of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. Winning both a Pulitzer Prize and a Drama Critics Circle Award, the play ran for more than 700 performances. Within a short while, it had been translated into over a dozen languages and had made its author a millionaire.

Overwhelmed by post-war paranoia and intolerance, Miller began work on the third of his major plays. Though it was clearly an indictment of the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, “The Crucible” was set in Salem during the witch-hunts of the late 17th century. The play, which deals with extraordinary tragedy in ordinary lives, expanded Miller’s voice and his concern for the physical and psychological wellbeing of the working class. Within three years, Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and convicted of contempt of Congress for not cooperating. A difficult time in his life, Miller ended a short and turbulent marriage with actress Marilyn Monroe. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote very little of note, concentrating at first on issues of guilt over the Holocaust, and later moving into comedies.

It was not until the 1991 productions of his “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” and “The Last Yankee” that Miller’s career began to see a resurgence. Both plays returned to the themes of success and failure that he had dealt with in earlier works. Concerning himself with the American dream, and the average American’s pursuit of it, Miller recognized a link between the poverty of the 1920s and the wealth of the 1980s. Encouraged by the success of these works, a number of his earlier pieces returned to the stage for revival performances.

More than any other playwright working today, Arthur Miller has dedicated himself to the investigation of the moral plight of the white American working class. With a sense of realism and a strong ear for the American vernacular, Miller has created characters whose voices are an important part of the American landscape. His insight into the psychology of desperation and his ability to create stories that express the deepest meanings of struggle, have made him one of the most highly regarded and widely performed American playwrights. In his eighty-fifth year, Miller remains an active and important part of American theater.

19-] American Literature - Tennessee Williams

19- ] American Literature

Tennessee Williams 1911-1983 

Thomas Lanier Williams III, known as Tennessee Williams is one of America’s most popular playwrights and now regarded as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. He wrote more than thirty plays, some of which have become classis of Western drama. He also wrote novels and short stories but is known almost exclusively for his plays. His genius was in the honesty with which he represented society and the art of presenting that in the form of absorbing drama.

Tennessee Williams, original name Thomas Lanier Williams, (born March 26, 1911, Columbus, Mississippi, U.S.—died February 25, 1983, New York City), American dramatist whose plays reveal a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility.

Williams became interested in playwriting while at the University of Missouri (Columbia) and Washington University (St. Louis) and worked at it even during the Great Depression while employed in a St. Louis shoe factory. Little theatre groups produced some of his work, encouraging him to study dramatic writing at the University of Iowa, where he earned a B.A. in 1938.

His first recognition came when American Blues (1939), a group of one-act plays, won a Group Theatre award. Williams, however, continued to work at jobs ranging from theatre usher to Hollywood scriptwriter until success came with The Glass Menagerie (1944). In it Williams portrayed a declassed Southern family living in a tenement. The play is about the failure of a domineering mother, Amanda, living upon her delusions of a romantic past, and her cynical son, Tom, to secure a suitor for Tom’s shy and withdrawn sister, Laura, who lives in a fantasy world with a collection of glass animals.

Williams’s next major play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), won a Pulitzer Prize. It is a study of the mental and moral ruin of Blanche DuBois, another former Southern belle, whose genteel pretensions are no match for the harsh realities symbolized by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

In 1953 Camino Real, a complex work set in a mythical, microcosmic town whose inhabitants include Lord Byron and Don Quixote, was a commercial failure, but his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which exposes the emotional lies governing relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and was successfully filmed, as was The Night of the Iguana (1961), the story of a defrocked minister turned sleazy tour guide, who finds God in a cheap Mexican hotel. Suddenly Last Summer (1958) deals with lobotomy, pederasty, and cannibalism, and in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) the gigolo hero is castrated for having infected a Southern politician’s daughter with venereal disease.

Williams was in ill health frequently during the 1960s, compounded by years of addiction to sleeping pills and liquor, problems that he struggled to overcome after a severe mental and physical breakdown in 1969. His later plays were unsuccessful, closing soon to poor reviews. They include Vieux Carré (1977), about down-and-outs in New Orleans; A Lovely Sunday for Crève Coeur (1978–79), about a fading belle in St. Louis during the Great Depression; and Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), centring on Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on the people they knew.

Williams also wrote two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975), essays, poetry, film scripts, short stories, and an autobiography, Memoirs (1975). His works won four Drama Critics’ awards and were widely translated and performed around the world.

The production of his first two Broadway plays, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), secured his place, along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, as one of America’s major playwrights of the 20th century. Critics, playgoers, and fellow dramatists recognized in Williams a poetic innovator who, refusing to be confined in what Stark Young in the New Republic called “the usual sterilities of our playwriting patterns,” pushed drama into new fields, stretched the limits of the individual play and became one of the founders of the so-called “New Drama.” Praising The Glass Menagerie “as a revelation of what superb theater could be,” Brooks Atkinson in Broadway asserted that “Williams’s remembrance of things past gave the theater distinction as a literary medium.” 20 years later, Joanne Stang wrote in the New York Times that “the American theater, indeed theater everywhere, has never been the same” since the premier of The Glass Menagerie. Four decades after that first play, C.W.E. Bigsby in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama termed it “one of the best works to have come out of the American theater.” A Streetcar Named Desire became only the second play in history to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Eric Bentley, in What Is Theatre?, called it the “master-drama of the generation.” “The inevitability of a great work of art,” T.E. Kalem stated in Albert J. Devlin’s Conversations with Tennessee Williams, “is that you cannot imagine the time when it didn’t exist. You can’t imagine a time when Streetcar didn’t exist.”

More clearly than with most authors, the facts of Williams’s life reveal the origins of the material he crafted into his best works. The Mississippi in which Thomas Lanier Williams was born was in many ways a world that no longer exists, “a dark, wide, open world that you can breathe in,” as Williams nostalgically described it in Harry Rasky’s Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation. The predominantly rural state was dotted with towns such as Columbus, Canton, and Clarksdale, in which he spent his first seven years with his mother, his sister, Rose, and his maternal grandmother and grandfather, an Episcopal rector. A sickly child, Tom was pampered by doting elders. In 1918, his father, a traveling salesman who had often been absent—perhaps, like his stage counterpart in The Glass Menagerie, “in love with long distances”—moved the family to St. Louis. Something of the trauma they experienced is dramatized in the 1945 play. The contrast between leisurely small-town past and northern big-city present, between protective grandparents and the hard-drinking, gambling father with little patience for the sensitive son he saw as a “sissy,” seriously affected both children. While Rose retreated into her own mind until finally beyond the reach even of her loving brother, Tom made use of that adversity. St. Louis remained for him “a city I loathe,” but the South, despite his portrayal of its grotesque aspects, proved a rich source to which he returned literally and imaginatively for comfort and inspiration. That background, his queerness, and his relationships—painful and joyous—with members of his family, were the strongest personal factors shaping Williams’s dramas.

During the St. Louis years, Williams found an imaginative release from unpleasant reality in writing essays, stories, poems, and plays. A recurrent motif in Williams’s plays involves flight and the fugitive, who, Lord Byron insists in Camino Real: A Play (1953) must keep moving, and his flight from St. Louis initiated a nomadic life of brief stays in a variety of places. Williams fled not only uncongenial atmospheres but a turbulent family situation that had culminated in a decision for Rose to have a prefrontal lobotomy in an effort to alleviate her increasing psychological problems. (Williams’s works often include absentee fathers, enduring—if aggravating—mothers, and dependent relatives; and the memory of Rose appears in some character, situation, symbol or motif in almost every work after 1938.) He fled as well some part of himself, for he had created a new persona—Tennessee Williams the playwright—who shared the same body as the proper young gentleman named Thomas with whom Tennessee would always be to some degree at odds.

In 1940, Williams’s Battle of Angels (1940) was staged by the Theatre Guild in an ill-fated production marred as much by faulty smudge pots in the lynching scene as by Boston censorship. Despite the abrupt out-of-town closing of the play, Williams was now known and admired by powerful theater people. During the next two decades, his most productive period, one play succeeded another, each of them permanent entries in the history of modern theater: The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). Despite increasingly adverse criticism, Williams continued his work for the theater for two more decades, during which he wrote more than a dozen additional plays containing evidence of his virtues as a poetic realist. In the course of his long career, he also produced three volumes of short stories, many of them as studies for subsequent dramas; two novels; two volumes of poetry; his memoirs; and essays on his life and craft. His dramas made that rare transition from legitimate stage to movies and television, from intellectual acceptance to popular acceptance. Before his death in 1983, he had become the best-known living dramatist; his plays had been translated and performed in many foreign countries, and his name and work had become known even to people who had never seen a production of any of his plays. The persona named Tennessee Williams had achieved the status of a myth.

Williams drew from the experiences of his persona. He saw himself as a shy, sensitive, gifted man trapped in a world where “mendacity” replaced communication, brute violence replaced love, and loneliness was, all too often, the standard human condition. These tensions “at the core of his creation” were identified by Harold Clurman in his introduction to Tennessee Williams: Eight Plays as a terror at what Williams saw in himself and in America, a terror that he must “exorcise” with “his poetic vision.” In an interview collected in Conversations with Tennessee Williams, Williams identified his main theme as a defense of the Old South attitude—”elegance, a love of the beautiful, a romantic attitude toward life”—and “a violent protest against those things that defeat it.” An idealist aware of what he called in a Conversations interview “the merciless harshness of America’s success-oriented society,” he was, ironically, naturalistic as well, conscious of the inaccessibility of that for which he yearned. Early on, he developed, according to John Gassner in Theatre at the Crossroads: Plays and Playwrights of the Mid-Century American Stage, “a precise naturalism” and continued to work toward a “fusion of naturalistic detail with symbolism and poetic sensibility rare in American playwriting.” The result was a unique romanticism, as Kenneth Tynan observed in Curtains, “which is not pale or scented but earthy and robust, the product of a mind vitally infected with the rhythms of human speech.”

Williams’s characters endeavor to embrace the ideal, to advance and not “hold back with the brutes,” a struggle no less valiant for being vain. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche’s idealization of life at Belle Reve, the DuBois plantation, cannot protect her once, in the words of the brutish Stanley Kowalski, she has come “down off them columns” into the “broken world,” the world of sexual desire. Since every human, as Val Xavier observes in Orpheus Descending, is sentenced “to solitary confinement inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live on earth,” the only hope is to try to communicate, to love, and to live—even beyond despair, as The Night of the Iguana teaches. The attempt to communicate often takes the form of sex (and Williams has been accused of obsession with that aspect of human existence), but at other times it becomes a willingness to show compassion, as when in The Night of the Iguana Hannah Jelkes accepts the neuroses of her fellow creatures and when in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy understands, as his son Brick cannot, the attachment between Brick and Skipper. In his preface to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams might have been describing his characters’ condition when he spoke of “the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.” “The marvel is,” as Tynan stated, that Williams’s “abnormal” view of life, “heightened and spotlighted and slashed with bogey shadows,” can be made to touch his audience’s more normal views, thus achieving that “miracle of communication” Williams believed to be almost impossible.

Some of his contemporaries—Arthur Miller, notably—responded to the modern condition with social protest, but Williams, after a few early attempts at that genre, chose another approach. Williams insisted in a Conversations interview that he wrote about the South not as a sociologist: “What I am writing about is human nature. ... Human relations are terrifyingly ambiguous.” Williams chose to present characters full of uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Yet Arthur Miller himself wrote in The Theatre Essays of Tennessee Williams that although Williams might not portray social reality, “the intensity with which he feels whatever he does feel is so deep, is so great” that his audiences glimpse another kind of reality, “the reality in the spirit.” Clurman likewise argued that though Williams was no “propagandist,” social commentary is “inherent in his portraiture.” The inner torment and disintegration of a character like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire thus symbolize the lost South from which she comes and with which she is inseparably entwined. It was to that lost world and the unpleasant one that succeeded it that Williams turned for the majority of his settings and material.

Like that of most Southern writers, Williams’s work exhibits an abiding concern with time and place and how they affect men and women. “The play is memory,” Tom proclaims in The Glass Menagerie; and Williams’s characters are haunted by a past that they have difficulty accepting or that they valiantly endeavor to transform into myth. Interested in yesterday or tomorrow rather than in today, painfully conscious of the physical and emotional scars the years inflict, they have a static, dreamlike quality, and the result, Tynan observed, is “the drama of mood.” The Mississippi towns of his childhood continued to haunt Williams’s imagination throughout his career, but New Orleans offered him, he told Robert Rice in the 1958 New York Post interviews, a new freedom: “The shock of it against the Puritanism of my nature has given me a subject, a theme, which I have never ceased exploiting.” (That shabby but charming city became the setting for several stories and one-act plays, and A Streetcar Named Desire derives much of its distinction from French Quarter ambience and attitudes; as Stella informs Blanche, “New Orleans isn’t like other cities,” a view reinforced by Williams’s 1977 portrait of the place in Vieux Carre.) Atkinson observed, “Only a writer who had survived in the lower depths of a sultry Southern city could know the characters as intimately as Williams did and be so thoroughly steeped in the aimless sprawl of the neighborhood life.”

Williams’s South provided not only settings but other characteristics of his work—romanticism; a myth of an Arcadian existence now disappeared; a distinctive way of looking at life, including both an inbred Calvinistic belief in the reality of evil eternally at war with good, and what Bentley called a “peculiar combination of the comic and the pathetic.” The South also inspired Williams’s fascination with violence, his drawing upon regional character types, and his skill in recording Southern language—eloquent, flowery, sometimes bombastic. Moreover, Southern history, particularly the US Civil War and the devastating Reconstruction period, imprinted on Williams, as on such major Southern fiction writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, a profound sense of separation and alienation. Williams, as Thomas E. Porter declared in Myth and Modern American Drama, explored “the mind of the Southerner caught between an idyllic past and an undesirable present,” commemorating the death of a myth even as he continued to examine it. “His broken figures appeal,” Bigsby asserted, “because they are victims of history—the lies of the old South no longer being able to sustain the individual in a world whose pragmatics have no place for the fragile spirit.” In a Conversations interview the playwright commented that “the South once had a way of life that I am just old enough to remember—a culture that had grace, elegance. ... I write out of regret for that.”

Williams’s plays are peopled with a large cast that J.L. Styan termed, in Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, “Garrulous Grotesques”; these figures include “untouchables whom he touches with frankness and mercy,” according to Tynan. They bear the stamp of their place of origin and speak a “humorous, colorful, graphic” language, which Williams in a Conversations interview called the “mad music of my characters.” “Have you ever known a Southerner who wasn’t long-winded?” he asked; “I mean, a Southerner not afflicted with terminal asthma.” Among that cast are the romantics who, however suspect their own virtues may be, act out of belief in and commitment to what Faulkner called the “old verities and truths of the heart.” They include fallen aristocrats hounded, Gerald Weales observed in American Drama since World War II, “by poverty, by age, by frustration,” or, as Bigsby called them in his 1985 study, “martyrs for a world which has already slipped away unmourned”; fading Southern belles such as Amanda Wingate and Blanche DuBois; slightly deranged women, such as Aunt Rose Comfort in an early one-act play and in the film “Baby Doll”; dictatorial patriarchs such as Big Daddy; and the outcasts (or “fugitive kind,” the playwright’s term later employed as the title of a 1960 motion picture). Many of these characters tend to recreate the scene in which they find themselves—Laura with her glass animals shutting out the alley where cats are brutalized, Blanche trying to subdue the ugliness of the Kowalski apartment with a paper lantern; in their dialogue they frequently poeticize and melodramatize their situations, thereby surrounding themselves with protective illusion, which in later plays becomes “mendacity.” For also inhabiting that dramatic world are more powerful individuals, amoral representatives of the new Southern order, Jabe Torrance in Battle of Angels, Gooper and Mae in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Boss Finley in Sweet Bird of Youth, enemies of the romantic impulse and as destructive and virtueless as Faulkner’s Snopes clan. Southern though all these characters are, they are not mere regional portraits, for through Williams’s dramatization of them and their dilemmas and through the audience’s empathy, the characters become everyman and everywoman.

Although traumatic experiences plagued his life, Williams was able to press “the nettle of neurosis” to his heart and produce art, as Gassner observed. Williams’s family problems, his alienation from the social norm resulting from his queerness, his sense of being a romantic in an unromantic, postwar world, and his sensitive reaction when a production proved less than successful all contributed significantly to his work. Through the years he suffered from a variety of ailments, some serious, some surely imaginary, and at certain periods he overindulged in alcohol and prescription drugs. Despite these circumstances, he continued to write with a determination that verged at times almost on desperation, even as his new plays elicited progressively more hostile reviews from critics.

An outgrowth of this suffering is the character type “the fugitive kind,” the wanderer who lives outside the pale of society, excluded by his sensitivity, artistic bent, or sexual proclivity from the world of “normal” human beings. Like Faulkner, Williams was troubled by the exclusivity of any society that shuts out certain segments because they are different. First manifested in Val of Battle of Angels (later rewritten as Orpheus Descending) and then in the character of Tom, the struggling poet of The Glass Menagerie and his shy, withdrawn sister, the fugitive kind appears in varying guises in subsequent plays, including Blanche DuBois, Alma Winemiller (Summer and Smoke), Kilroy (Camino Real), and Hannah and Shannon (The Night of the Iguana). Each is unique but they share common characteristics, which Weales summed up as physical or mental illness, a preoccupation with sex, and a “combination of sensitivity and imagination with corruption.” Their abnormality suggests, the critic argued, that the dramatist views the norm of society as being faulty itself. Even characters within the “norm” (Stanley Kowalski, for example) are often identified with strong sexual drives. Like D.H. Lawrence, Williams indulged in a kind of phallic romanticism, attributing sexual potency to members of the unintelligent lower classes and sterility to aristocrats. Despite his romanticism, however, Williams’s view of humanity was too realistic for him to accept such pat categories. “If you write a character that isn’t ambiguous,” Williams said in a Conversations interview, “you are writing a false character, not a true one.” Though he shared Lawrence’s view that one should not suppress sexual impulses, Williams recognized that such impulses are at odds with the romantic desire to transcend and that they often lead to suffering like that endured by Blanche DuBois. Those fugitive characters who are destroyed, Bigsby remarked, often perish “because they offer love in a world characterized by impotence and sterility.” Thus phallic potency may represent a positive force in a character such as Val or a destructive force in one like Stanley Kowalski; but even in A Streetcar Named Desire Williams acknowledges that the life force, represented by Stella’s baby, is positive. There are, as Weales pointed out, two divisions in the sexual activity Williams dramatizes: “desperation sex,” in which characters such as Val and Blanche “make contact with another only tentatively, momentarily” in order to communicate; and the “consolation and comfort” sex that briefly fulfills Lady in Orpheus Descending and saves Serafina in The Rose Tattoo. There is, surely, a third kind, sex as a weapon, wielded by those like Stanley; this kind of sex is to be feared, for it is often associated with the violence prevalent in Williams’s dramas.

Beginning with Battle of Angels, two opposing camps have existed among Williams’s critics, and his detractors sometimes have objected most strenuously to the innovations his supporters deemed virtues. His strongest advocates among established drama critics, notably Stark Young, Brooks Atkinson, John Gassner, and Walter Kerr, praised him for realistic clarity; compassion and a strong moral sense; unforgettable characters, especially women, based on his keen perception of human nature; dialogue at once credible and poetic; and a pervasive sense of humor that distinguished him from O’Neill and Miller.

Not surprisingly, it was from the conservative establishment that most of the adverse criticism came. Obviously appalled by this “upstart crow,” George Jean Nathan, dean of theater commentators when Williams made his revolutionary entrance onto the scene, sounded notes often to be repeated. In The Theatre Book of the Year, 1947-1948, he faulted Williams’s early triumphs for “mistiness of ideology ... questionable symbolism ... debatable character drawing ... adolescent point of view ... theatrical fabrication,” obsession with sex, fallen women, and “the deranged Dixie damsel.” Nathan saw Williams as a melodramatist whose attempts at tragedy were as ludicrous as “a threnody on a zither.” Subsequent detractors—notably Richard Gilman, Robert Brustein, Clive Barnes, and John Simon—taxed the playwright for theatricality, repetition, lack of judgment and control, excessive moralizing and philosophizing, and conformity to the demands of the ticket-buying public. His plays, they variously argued, lacked unity of effect, clarity of intention, social content, and variety; these critics saw the plays as burdened with excessive symbolism, violence, sexuality, and attention to the sordid, grotesque elements of life. Additionally, certain commentators charged that Elia Kazan, the director of the early masterpieces, virtually rewrote A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A particular kind of negative criticism, often intensely emotional, seemed to dominate evaluations of the plays produced in the last 20 years of Williams’s life.

Most critics, even his detractors, have praised the dramatist’s skillful creation of dialogue. Bentley asserted that “no one in the English-speaking theater” created better dialogue, that Williams’s plays were really “written—that is to say, set down in living language.” Ruby Cohn stated in Dialogue in American Drama that Williams gave to American theater “a new vocabulary and rhythm,” and Clurman concluded, “No one in the theater has written more melodiously. Without the least artificial flourish, his writing takes flight from the naturalistic to the poetic.” Even Mary McCarthy, no ardent fan, stated in Theatre Chronicles: 1937-1962 that Williams was the only American realist other than Paddy Chayevsky with an ear for dialogue, knew speech patterns, and really heard his characters. There were, of course, objections to Williams’s lyrical dialogue, different as it is from the dialogue of O’Neill, Miller, or any other major American playwright. Bentley admitted to finding his “fake poeticizing” troublesome at times, while Bigsby insisted that Williams was at his best only when he restrained “over-poetic language” and symbolism with “an imagination which if melodramatic is also capable of fine control.” However, those long poetic speeches or “arias” in plays of the first 25 years of his career became a hallmark of the dramatist’s work.

Another major area of contention among commentators has been Williams’s use of symbols, which he called in a Conversations interview “the natural language of drama.” Laura’s glass animals, the paper lantern and cathedral bells in A Streetcar Named Desire, the legless birds of Orpheus Descending, and the iguana in The Night of the Iguana, to name only a few, are integral to the plays in which they appear. Cohn commented on Williams’s extensive use of animal images in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to symbolize the fact that all the Pollitts, “grasping, screeching, devouring,” are “greedily alive.” In that play, Big Daddy’s malignancy effectively represents the corruption in the family and in the larger society to which the characters belong. However, Weales objected that Williams, like The Glass Menagerie’s Tom, had “a poet’s weakness for symbols,” which can get out of hand; he argued that in Suddenly Last Summer, Violet Venable’s garden does not grow out of the situation and enrich the play. Sometimes, Cohn observed, a certain weakness of symbolism “is built into the fabric of the drama.”

Critics favorable to Williams have agreed that one of his virtues lay in his characterization. Those “superbly actable parts,” Atkinson stated, derived from his ability to find “extraordinary spiritual significance in ordinary people.” Cohn admired Williams’s “Southern grotesques” and his knack for giving them “dignity,” although some critics have been put off by the excessive number of such grotesques, which contributed, they argued, to a distorted view of reality. Commentators have generally concurred in their praise of Williams’s talent in creating credible female roles. “No one in American drama has written more intuitively of women,” Clurman asserted; Gassner spoke of Williams’s “uncanny familiarity with the flutterings of the female heart.” Kerr in The Theatre in Spite of Itself expressed wonder at such roles as that of Hannah in The Night of the Iguana, “a portrait which owes nothing to calipers, or to any kind of tooling; it is all surprise and presence, anticipated intimacy. It is found gold, not a borrowing against known reserves.” Surveying the “steamy zoo” of Williams’s characters with their violence, despair, and aberrations, Stang commended the author for the “poetry and compassion that comprise his great gift.” Compassion is the key word in all tributes to Williams’s characterization. It is an acknowledgment of the playwright’s uncanny talent for making audiences and readers empathize with his people, however grotesque, bizarre, or even sordid they may seem on the surface.

Although they have granted him compassion, some of his detractors maintain that Williams does not exhibit a clear philosophy of life, and they have found unacceptable the ambiguity in judging human flaws and frailties that is one of his most distinctive qualities. For them, one difficulty stems from the playwright’s recognition of and insistence on portraying the ambiguity of human activities and relationships. Moral, even puritanical, though he might be, Williams never seems ready to condemn any action other than “deliberate cruelty,” and even that is sometimes portrayed as resulting from extenuating circumstances.

In terms of dramatic technique, those who acknowledge his genius disagree as to where it has been best expressed. For Jerold Phillips, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Williams’s major contribution lay in turning from the Ibsenesque social problem plays to “Strindberg-like explorations of what goes on underneath the skin,” thereby freeing American theater from “the hold of the so-called well-made play.” For Allan Lewis in American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre, he was a “brilliant inventor of emotionally intense scenes” whose “greatest gift [lay] in suggesting ideas through emotional relations.” His preeminence among dramatists in the United States, Jean Gould wrote in Modern American Playwrights, resulted from a combination of poetic sensitivity, theatricality, and “the dedication of the artist.” If, from the beginning of his career, there were detractors who charged Williams with overuse of melodramatic, grotesque, and violent elements that produced a distorted view of reality, Kerr, in The Theatre in Spite of Itself, termed him “a man unafraid of melodrama, and a man who handles it with extraordinary candor and deftness.”

Other commentators have been offended by what Bentley termed Williams’s “exploitation of the obscene”: his choice of characters—outcasts, alcoholics, the violent and deranged and sexually abnormal—and of subject matter—incest, castration, and cannibalism. Williams justified the “sordid” elements of his work in a Conversations interview when he asserted that “we must depict the awfulness of the world we live in, but we must do it with a kind of aesthetic” to avoid producing mere horror.

Another negative aspect of Williams’s art, some critics argued, was his theatricality. Gassner asserted in Directions in Modern Theatre and Drama that Kazan, the director, avoided flashy stage effects called for in Williams’s text of The Glass Menagerie, but that in some plays Kazan collaborated with the playwright to exaggerate these effects, especially in the expressionistic and allegorical drama Camino Real. In a Conversations interview, Williams addressed this charge, particularly as it involved Kazan, by asserting, “My cornpone melodrama is all my own. I want excitement in the theater. ... I have a tendency toward romanticism and a taste for the theatrical.”

Late in his career, Williams faced increasingly harsh criticism. Beginning with Period of Adjustment, a comedy generally disliked by critics, there were years of rejection of play after play. By the late 1960s, even the longtime advocate Atkinson observed that in “a melancholy resolution of an illustrious career” the dramatist was producing plays “with a kind of desperation” in which he lost control of content and style. Lewis, accusing Williams of repeating motifs, themes, and characters in play after play, asserted that in failing “to expand and enrich” his theme, he had “dissipated a rare talent.” Gilman, in a particularly vituperative review titled “Mr. Williams, He Dead,” included in his Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre, 1961-1970, charged that the “moralist,” subtly present in earlier plays, was “increasingly on stage.” Even if one granted a diminution of creative powers, however, the decline in Williams’s popularity and position as major playwright in the 1960s and 1970s can be attributed in large part to a marked change in the theater itself. Audiences constantly demanded variety, and although the early creations of the playwright remained popular, theatergoers wanted something different, strange, exotic. One problem, Kerr pointed out, was that Williams was so good, people expected him to continue to get better; judging each play against those which had gone before denied a fair hearing to the new creations.

Williams died due to a choking accident in 1983 in New York City. Following his accidental death, some of those who had been during his last years his severest critics acknowledged the greatness of his achievement. Bigsby, for example, found in a reanalysis of the late plays more than mere vestiges of the strengths of earlier years, especially in Out Cry, an experimental drama toward which Williams felt a particular affection. Even Simon, who had dismissed play after play, acknowledged in New York that he had underestimated the playwright’s genius and significance. Williams was, finally, viewed by formerly skeptical observers, as a rebel who broke with the rigid conventions of drama that had preceded him, explored new territory in his quest for a distinctive form and style, created characters as unforgettable as those of Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or William Faulkner, and lifted the language of the modern stage to a poetic level unmatched in his time.

Posthumous publications of Williams’s writings—correspondence and plays among them—show the many sides of this complex literary legend. Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982 (1990) takes its title from the name the author gave to Russian-born actress and socialite Maria Britneva, later Maria St. Just, “the confidante Williams wrote to in the evening after his day’s work—his ‘Five O’Clock Angel,’ as he called her in a typically genteel, poetic periphrasis,” noted Edmund White in a piece for the New York Times Book Review. These letters, White added, allow readers “to see the source of everything in his work that was lyrical, innocent, loving, and filled with laughter.” Among the other works published posthumously is Something Cloudy, Something Clear. A play first produced in 1981 and published in 1995, Something Cloudy, Something Clear recounts the author’s queer relationship with a dancer in Provincetown. His queerness—this time in a violent context—also takes center stage in Not about Nightingales, a tale of terror in a men’s prison. Actress Vanessa Redgrave reportedly played a key role in bringing this early play—written circa 1939—to the London stage in 1998.

Williams is among the most quotable of American playwrights, and he remains widely celebrated for the unique language he brought to modern theater. He introduced to dramatic literature a cast of remarkable, memorable characters and turned his attention and sympathy toward people and subjects that, before his time, had been considered beneath the concern of serious authors. With “distinctive dramatic feeling,” Gassner said in Theatre at the Crossroads, Williams “made pulsating plays out of his visions of a world of terror, confusion, and perverse beauty.” As a result, Gassner concluded, Williams “makes indifference to the theater virtually impossible.”