The World of Tennessee Williams

jonwhansen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:51:47 +0000

In 1978, Richard Freeman Leavitt’s The World of Tennessee Williams, a photo-biography of the playwright and history of the various productions of his plays, was published. with the full approval and cooperation of the playwright. Tennessee Williams even wrote an introduction to the volume in which he referred to its author as “my old, though still young, friend Dick Leavitt” and referred to his “long and exacting task of getting these bits and pieces of evidence together.” It was always Leavitt’s intention to update the work after the death of Tennessee Williams to include the last decade of his life. The World of Tennessee Williams (Hansen Publishing Group, 2009) is a fulfillment of that plan, which Richard died without completing.

The World of Tennessee Williams offers a survey of the life and career of one of American’s greatest dramatists from birth in 1911 to his death in 1983. Richard Leavitt was in a unique position to create such a volume, since he was a friend of Tennessee’s and followed his career close up. Kenneth Holditch, who has undertaken the task of completing the text and choosing additional photographs, was a friend of Leavitt’s and knew Tennessee Williams. It has been his desire to carry to fruition the original plan Dick Leavitt conceived in the 1970s and augmented in 1983 when Williams died.

To date, the best biography of Williams is that of Lyle Leverich, another friend of both Leavitt and Holditch. Unfortunately, only one volume of that biography was ever published, and it only covers the dramatist’s life through The Glass Menagerie, his first successful Broadway play. Leverich died before the second volume could be completed, and until now no one has undertaken the completion of that project. Therefore, The World of Tennessee Williams, a biography, is all the more important, since it offers a survey, from birth to death, of the life and career of Tennessee Williams, whose reputation, world-wide, grows stronger with each passing year.