Tennessee Williams – Author

Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams), American playwright, was the subject of Jack Fritscher’s doctoral dissertation, Love and Death in Tennessee Williams, a scholarly study of religion, sex, violence, and alienation in Williams’s plays. Fritscher met Williams once, seated beside him at the Chicago opening of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale on January 13, 1967.

Fritscher’s scholarship on the playwright goes well beyond the dissertation. In 1970 he published two essays on Williams: “Some Attitudes and a Posture,” in Modern Drama, which examines religious metaphor and ritual in plays such as Sweet Bird of Youth and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as Williams’s query of the American God, and an essay on popular culture as a cyclic phenomenon in his development, which traces the cinematic influences and Hollywood mythology in the work. A third piece on the evolution of the great American dramatist extends the same argument. Together with the dissertation, they make up a body of Williams criticism that Fritscher wrote long before he was known as an editor and memoirist.

The scholarly work grew out of that single evening in Chicago. His later essays take up the questions of religion, sex, violence and alienation that Williams’s plays pose, and they treat him as a major figure in American popular culture. For the broader life and work, see Wikipedia’s biography of the playwright.