Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams

Review\n"Throughout his life Williams reflected, in his work, the entrapment, family dysfunction, and madness he associated with two miserable decades in St. Louis. Citing Williams’s plays, poetry, stories, memoir, interviews, and even his Greek exam from St. Louis’s Washington University, Schvey is the ideal guide in this first book-length study of the city’s imprint on Williams. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice\n“Schvey’s writing style is delightful to read...it manages to fuse the meticulous research of the scholar with a personal voice and connection to Williams that makes the book come alive.”—Annette J. Saddik, Professor of Theatre and Literature, City University of New York, author of Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer\n“Tennessee Williams's formative St. Louis years—spanning his adolescence and early adulthood—have for so long been biographical flyover country, barely acknowledged even by Williams himself. Now a fellow St. Louisan, Henry Schvey, has brought this period vividly to life. Blue Song, with its impeccable scholarship and intimate personal engagement, finally completes the portrait of America's greatest playwright.”—Rocco Landesman, Former chair of the NEA and 3-time Tony Award winning Broadway producer\n“When Tennessee Williams was asked what brought him to New Orleans, he said ‘St Louis’. In this eminently readable and exhaustively researched study, Henry Schvey deftly swivels the spotlight illuminating the work of Tennessee Williams from the freedom of New Orleans which is typically heralded as the source of his greatness and shines it boldly back into the prison of Tennessee’s life in ‘Saint Pollution’ which enshrouded him with a darkness he was never able to escape. A notable contribution to the understanding of this great ever fascinating American playwright.”—John Guare, playwright and screenwriter, author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation\n“Tennessee Williams spent twenty years in St. Louis, from 1918 until 1938, but in Blue Song, Henry I. Schvey eloquently and convincingly shows how his time there significantly impacted the subject matter and themes of his work throughout his life. He does this through illuminating analyses of the lesser-known plays, stories, and poems he wrote while he was in St. Louis, and with fresh examinations of both obscure and more familiar later plays which demonstrate how his complex feelings about his St. Louis years pervaded them as well. Throughout, Schvey’s careful research combines with the acuity of his critiques to produce a valuable contribution to both the biographical and critical record of one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary figures.”—Jackson R. Bryer, University of Maryland, co-editor of William Inge: Essays and Reminiscences on the Plays and the Man\n“For Tennessee Williams, St. Louis was a trap, as was his family. He found it literally and emotionally suffocating, the air thick with smoke from the burning of bituminous coal, his father remote, his mother garrulous, his sister mentally damaged. He longed to escape, like the narrator of The Glass Menagerie, even as entrapment would become a central image and subject in his plays. It was, indeed, as Henry Schvey points out in a penetrating study, where, late in life, he would be incarcerated in a mental hospital and, finally, be buried. Yet, as Schvey also insists, it was where his talent was born, where he saw his first plays staged, imprinting itself on his imagination so that in a way he never did escape. There could scarcely be a better guide to a city’s impact on a writer, in a book which also offers new insights into plays familiar and unfamiliar by one of America’s greatest playwrights.”—Christopher Bigsby, author of Staging America: Twenty-First-Century Dramatists\n“While ‘Missouri’ Williams would have never rolled off the tongue as slickly as ‘Tennessee,’ Henry I. Schvey argues convincingly that the young Tom Williams’