Tennessee Williams Called Rivals 'Vampires', Says New Biography

Tennessee Williams' new biography, "Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life," will be published thirty years after the playwright's death.

An unpublished work of U.S. playwright Tennessee Williams has been discovered where Williams compares his rivals to "vampires" who leave "the stench smell of a rotting, overripe ego" on their productions. While Williams' plays are some of the most produced  even today, experts speculate that this unpublished typed manuscript was composed at a time when Williams was struggling with his career and had to invest his own money to have people come watch his plays.

The unpublished manuscript is part of the new biography titled "Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life," which will be published February, 2013. Author John Bak, who compiled the biography, found more than a 1,000 pages of the unpublished manuscript where Williams heavily criticizes actors, writers, producers and directors from the 1960s onwards.

Another comment in the manuscript calls playwrights unattractively awkward, graceless, embarrassing, blushing, shuffling, stammering, fidgeting wretches. Williams compares them to vampires who try to drive out of directors and actors what's missing in their scripts. He also calls them cruel beggars of art. According to Williams, they are always drunk. If not, they are as boring as a funeral director that stands with a doctor over a dying patient's bed. Williams however hadn't named any playwright in particular in his manuscripts, except the ones he respected like Beckett and Pinter.  

The audience too didn't escape the wrath of the playwright who called "Broadway society" a marvelous audience except on the first night of a play. 'They sit there attentive to every word of the script and every move of the players. Some people regard them as cultural cannibals. Untrue! It's unlikely that they have read the latest book of the avant-garde verse but, in their own microcosm, they are terrifically knowing. Their's is the applause that means the most to playwrights," writes Williams.

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