Tennessee Williams

Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

By: John Lahr

Narrated by: Elizabeth Ashley

Length: 26 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2014 John Lahr (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved

Critic reviews

• National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Biography, 2014

Perfect combination of story and narration

Oftentimes, good stories suffer from poor narration. Elizabeth Ashley is pitch perfect in her narration of John Lahr's exceptional book. Listeners will not be disappointed.

Great Story

I didn't want it to end! Very thorough and entertaining. A brilliant mind and a tragic life.

Terrific

Beautifully written extremely detailed and extensively researched It deservedly received the Pulitzer Prize Highly recommenced

Beautiful retelling of the story of Tennessee..

embedded in his plays…. I loved hearing about the writing and mounting of Menagerie, Streetcar, Cat, Rose Tattoo, and Iguana.. brilliant and iconic playwright.. im obsessed w TW…

Enthralling drama its subject would have enjoyed

I couldn't stop listening to Elizabeth Ashley's perfectly evocative performance of this biography... that felt more truly like a drama than a nonfiction work.
Good on you, John Lahr!! Thoughtful, even, wide open account with the perfect amount of detail. I loved the narrative structure being more dramatic than chronological.
Good on you, Elizabeth Ashley! You are now Tennessee Williams' voice in my subconscious. What a delicious voice you have for this text, although it is so much more than text, thanks to Lahr & Ashley (OK, and the late great T. Williams)!

outstanding

One of the best biographies I've ever read. The performance by Elizabeth Ashley brought the story and William's words to life for me.

Excellent Narrator

Elizabeth Ashley does an amazing job for 26 hours material. The writing by John Larh is excellent and Ashley's style, textured voice and ability to slip into accents makes the time fly by. I really have no criticism of the book or performance. If anything I want the physical book just so I can sit with the writing longer than an audiobook allows for.

Wonderful

If you like great biographies about dramatic men read by what sounds like a seventy year old Broadway actress who smoked three packs a day since she was thirteen, this is your book.

WOW.

I was looking forward to this book and it did not disappoint. What a talent. What a LIFE. Highly recommend!

Monumental!

Having only seen movie productions of four of Tennessee Williams' plays, my knowledge of him as a person was limited to "Southern, gay, wrote wrenching plays".

The life and times narrated in this book had me completely agog and left me with a determination to read his works, attend live performances and watch all the film footage available - not only of his works, but the man himself, in the countless interviews found online. There's really nothing I can say about 'the story' to do it justice. It speaks for itself - the good, the bad, the ugly, the human. The immense, monumental, driven human. While pulling no punches about the main character's frailties and flaws, Mr. Lahr does so with much compassion, warmth and admiration, from the first all (aaallll!) the way through to the last paragraph.

Throughout, I felt like a voyeur in the story, empathizing, glorying and agonizing with not only Tennessee Williams but also the many other characters who so profoundly impacted his life (shout out to Elia Kazan, who's work I'd only begun to research, and has now moved to the top of my list).

Elizabeth Ashley's performance, reading this gigantic, twenty six and one half long volume was superb, (again, from the first all (aaallll!) the way through to the last word). As other reviewers noted, there were passages where her breathing could be heard. Since, naturally, this reading was conducted in multiple 'sittings', that distraction was sometimes more apparent than others. Could there have been better technical editing? Yes, most likely, but ultimately, who can criticize an almost 27 hour performance of this odyssey, with the characterization and dictions so perfectly rendered? (And that golden voice!) If I could, I'd give Ms. Ashley's performance ten stars out of 5 and a resounding standing ovation.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in Tennessee Williams, the man, the artist and everything else he was, and also in the mid-20th Century theater, literary and film milieu (melee?). His impact was atomic during his life, and we're still picking through the fallout more than forty years after he left us. In "The Glass Menagerie", the "Tennessee character" was nicknamed Shakespeare, which is an excellent allusion to Mr. Williams himself. The humanity in his work is timeless and transcends cultural boundaries.

I will now need a day or a few to recollect myself, come back into the present and try to find the next book that will 'hold up' after what I've just experienced. It will likely need to be one by Tennessee Williams.