Reviews
Could this be the best theater book I''''ve ever read? It just might be. Tennessee Williams had two great pieces of luck: Elia Kazan to direct his work and now John Lahr to make thrilling sense of his life., This is by far the best book ever written about America's greatest playwright. John Lahr, the longtime drama critic for the New Yorker, knows his way around Broadway better than anyone. He is a witty and elegant stylist, a scrupulous researcher, a passionate yet canny advocate... He brings us as close to Williams as we are ever likely to get., This is a masterpiece about a genius. Only John Lahr, with his perceptions about the theater, about writers, about poetry, and about people could have written this book. What a marvelous read., Fascinating... Lahr gives us a sense of the ebb and flow of Williams's life, exercising a critic's keen eye on the plays, a novelist's gift for characterization, and a historian's awareness of the way a changing American society colored his work... As much a biography of the plays as of the playwright--a book that lets the life illuminate the work and the work illuminate the life., John Lahr's brilliant and seamless book, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is a labor of the profoundest love, and it comes from the heart and mind of one of our greatest theater writers., Scintillating on the backstage and bedroom dramas and almost intrusively perceptive on the autobiographical nature of Williams' art., Offers plenty of backstage anecdotes and high private drama.... But Mr. Lahr, ever the critic, keeps the plays themselves front and center.... The book has already won enthusiastic advance notice...along with blurbs from a kick line of A-list 'theatricals' including Helen Mirren, John Guare and Tony Kushner., A work that is scintillating on the backstage and bedroom dramas and almost intrusively perceptive on the autobiographical nature of Williams' art., Lahr has managed to capture the complex and at times contradictory qualities--the razor wit and gracious Southern charm, the bottomless drive and uncanny capacity for self-destruction--that characterized one of the 20th century's greatest writers., Could this be the best theater book I've ever read? It just might be. Tennessee Williams had two great pieces of luck: Elia Kazan to direct his work and now John Lahr to make thrilling sense of his life., Magnificent...one of the best written and most extraordinary biographies I've ever read, in any field., There''''s never been an American critic like John Lahr. His writing exalts, honors, and dignifies the profession and, more importantly, the art., John Lahr1s brilliant and seamless book, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is a labor of the profoundest love, and it comes from the heart and mind of one of our greatest theater writers., At once sensitive and magisterial, and it fulfills the ultimate test for a literary biography by convincing you that the works cannot be understood without it. Once you have read it, it becomes part of their meaning., Lahr's expansive, polished and keenly observed volume is a major work of American theater criticism and biography., Brilliant and seamless. A labor of the profoundest love, and it comes from the heart and mind of one of our greatest theater writers., There's never been an American critic like John Lahr. His writing exalts, honors, and dignifies the profession and, more importantly, the art., The singular achievement of John Lahr's magisterial book, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is that it's one betwitching writer's journey into the lives--public and private--of another., A crucial contribution to the arguments that should always rage around a man who was one of the greatest American playwrights of his tempestuous century., Elegantly written as well as psychologically acute... Lahr balances quotation and interpretation, sympathy and criticism, in this searing and unforgettable portrait of the artist who gave voice to the repressed, the reviled and the restless., [P]rodigiously researched... acute and elegant... Lahr is most superb on the relationship between Williams and the director Eliz Kazan, perhaps his greatest collaborator., It is a masterpiece on several levels: of synthesis and analysis (an amazing life apprehended afresh, with great learning lightly borne and a strong streak of showbiz savvy; a page-turner that is almost embarrassingly devourable).