Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Drama - Hardcover

by M. Paller (Author)

Gentlemen Callers provides a fascinating look at America's greatest Twentieth-century playwright and perhaps the most-performed, even today. Michael Paller looks at Tennessee Williams's plays from the 1940s through the 1960s against the backdrop of the playwright's life story, providing fresh details. Through this lens Paller examines the evolution of Mid-Twentieth-century America's acknowledgment and acceptance of homosexuality. From the early Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and one-act Auto-da-Fé, through The Two-Character Play and Something Cloudy, Something Clear, Paller's book investigates how Williams's earliest critics marginalized or ignored his gay characters and why, beginning in the 1970s, many gay liberationists reviled them. Lively, blunt, and provocative, this book will appeal to anyone who loves Williams, Broadway, and the theater.

Front Jacket

Tennessee Williams was America's most original dramatic talent. He was also gay. The significance of this fact is explored by Michael Paller in a book full of striking insights into the man, the plays, and the theatre of which he was a part. What emerges from this study is a familiar figure seen in a new complexity. What also emerges is an America whose oppressive laws and casual cruelties toward those who shared his sexuality in part created the pressures which created the context, if not always the subject, of his art.--Christopher Bigsby, Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia and Director of the Arthur Miller Centre

Author Biography

MICHAEL PALLER teaches at Columbia University and the State University of New York at Purchase, and lives in New York City, USA.