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Informationen zum Autor Katherine Weiss is Associate Dean at California State University Los Angeles, USA. She was formerly Professor of English and Assistant Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Literature and Language, East Tennessee State University, USA. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin; Califronia State University and the University of Reading, UK (where she earned her PhD), she is chiefly interested in Modern and Contemporary Drama, and Irish Literature. She is the author of The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Methuen Drama, 2012) a stimulating analysis of Beckett's work, encompassing his stage, radio and television plays, and editor of the Student Edition of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams; 1911-83) was a US playwright, whose controversial plays dealt with themes of repressed sexuality and family conflict. Williams was the most popular playwright in America between 1945 and 1960, winning the Pulitzer Prize twice and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award four times. Amongst serious playwrights, only Eugene O'Neill equalled his achievements on the Broadway stage; several of Williams's plays were also made into successful films. The son of a shoe salesman, Williams grew up in some poverty in Mississippi and Missouri. Many of his early frustrations, which are reflected in his plays, arose from the prudery of his mother and the coarseness of his womanizing father, who, as his son's homosexuality became apparent, invariably referred to him as 'Miss Nancy'. The playwright revealed his homosexuality in his Memoirs (1975), having previously explored the subject in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer . Williams tried his hand at fiction and poetry before turning to drama in the late 1930s, winning a Theatre Guild prize for the four one-act plays entitled American Blues in 1939. Recognition as a major playwright came with The Glass Menagerie , a tender work inspired by the tragic life of his sister, a schizophrenic. His next play, the brutal A Streetcar Named Desire, opened in 1947, winning the Pulitzer Prize and making a star of Marlon Brando. It was followed a year later by Summer and Smoke . In 1949, these three plays were running simultaneously in London. His later works included The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Orpheus Descending (1957), and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1959), which opened with Paul Newman and Geraldine Page in the leads. By the late 1950s, Williams was being accused of repeating himself, and after Period of Adjustment (1960) and The Night of the Iguana (1961), his plays were received unenthusiastically. During his later years, Williams became increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol, suffering a nervous breakdown in 1969. He died in 1983. Katherine Weiss is Associate Dean at California State University Los Angeles, USA. She was formerly Professor of English and Assistant Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Literature and Language, East Tennessee State University, USA. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin; Califronia State University and the University of Reading, UK (where she earned her PhD), she is chiefly interested in Modern and Contemporary Drama, and Irish Literature. She is the author of The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Methuen Drama, 2012) a stimulating analysis of Beckett's work, encompassing his stage, radio and television plays, and editor of the Student Edition of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. Klappentext Sweet Bird of Youth is Tennessee William's atmospheric play of 1959 about Chance Wayne, the one-time heart-throb of his hometown who returns hoping to break into the movies and find the girl he loved in his youth. Accompanied by faded movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, grieving in a haze of drugs and alcohol for her lost youth, he discovers that time is shortly to cat...
