-

 

After college, he moved to New Orleans, a city that would inspire much of his writing. On March 31, 1945, his play, The Glass Menagerie, opened on Broadway and two years later A Streetcar Named Desire earned Williams his first Pulitzer Prize. Many of Williams' plays have been adapted to film starring screen greats like Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Williams died in 1983.


The city would inspire much of his writing. On March 31, 1945, his play, The Glass Menagerie, opened on Broadway and two years later A Streetcar Named Desire earned Williams his first Pulitzer Prize. Many of Williams' plays have been adapted to film starring screen greats like Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.

A Few “Fun Facts”
Despite his most famous works being rooted in realism and taking place in the United States, Williams’ first ever short story revolved around an ancient Egyptian queen named Nitocris. The story, titled The Vengeance of Nitocris, follows the queen going on a rampage to avenge her dead brother (let’s just say, a lot of Egyptians drowned in the story).

The story was purchased by the pulp magazine Weird Tales when Williams was just 16 years old, and it was published in August 1928. Williams made the equivalent of around $500 in modern currency

When Williams was just 16, he wrote an essay which was chosen to be published in the literary magazine Smart Set. Titled “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” the essay won Williams a whopping prize of… five dollars (to be fair, in 2017, that prize would have been worth around $70).

“Which Floor, Sir.” Like many writers, Williams worked a number of different jobs before his writing career really kicked off. One of these jobs was a hotel elevator operator when he was living in New York.

In a span of roughly ten years between 1948 and 1959, no fewer than seven plays penned by Williams appeared on Broadway.

Williams first learned creativity as a child from his African-American nurse. Known only to history as Ozzie, she would frequently tell Williams tales which would later encourage his own storytelling abilities.

And so the world came to know the great actor Marlon Brando.


Building Great Collections, One Fine Book at a Time
Visit us at BlindHorseBooks.com




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
  Adler long strove to bring philosophy to the masses, and some of his works (such as How to Read a Book) became popular bestsellers. He was also an advocate of economic democracy and wrote an influential preface to Louis O. Kelso's The Capitalist Manifesto.    Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set.  The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas identified by the editors. The books were not chosen based on ethnic and cultural inclusiveness, historical influence, or the editors' agreement with the views expressed by the authors.  FOOD FOR THE
Read more
-
Image
  Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings in black ink, influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death at 25 from tuberculosis. In 1892, Beardsley travelled to Paris, where he discovered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints, both of which would be major influences on his own style. Beardsley's first commission was Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory (1893), which he illustrated for the publishing house J. M. Dent and Company. Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grote
Read more
-
Image
  An English poet, who later became an American citizen. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Epitaph on a Tyrant Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. Above is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, he manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny.  He lived in Berlin in the 1930’s and published the poem in 1939. The specific tyrant Auden had in min
Read more