Not About Nightingales
by Tennessee Williams
On This Page
Description
One of Tennessee Williams's first plays, "Not About Nightingales" portrays the lives of inmates in a Pennsylvania prison who were steamed to death after leading their fellow prisoners on a hunger strike.Tags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
332+ Works 31,926 Members
After O'Neill, Williams is perhaps the best dramatist the United States has yet produced. Born in his grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams and his family later moved to St. Louis. There Williams endured many bad years caused by the abuse of his father and his own anguish over his introverted sister, who was later permanently show more institutionalized. Williams attended the University of Missouri, and, after time out to clerk for a shoe company and for his own mental breakdown, also attended Washington University of St. Louis and the University of Iowa, from which he graduated in 1938. Williams began to write plays in 1935. During 1943 he spent six months as a contract screenwriter for MGM but produced only one script, The Gentleman Caller. When MGM rejected it, Williams turned it into his first major success, The Glass Menagerie (1945). In this intensely autobiographical play, Williams dramatizes the story of Amanda, who dreams of restoring her lost past by finding a gentleman caller for her crippled daughter, and of Amanda's son Tom, who longs to escape from the responsibility of supporting his mother and sister. After The Glass Menagerie,Williams wrote his masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, (1947), along with a steady stream of other plays, among them such major works as Summer and Smoke(1948), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). His plays celebrate the "fugitive kind," the sensitive outcasts whose outsider status allows them to perceive the horror of the world and who often give additional witness to that horror by becoming its victims. Stephen S. Stanton has summed up Williams's "virtues and strengths" as "a genius for portraiture, particularly of women, a sensitive ear for dialogue and the rhythms of natural speech, a comic talent often manifesting itself in "black comedy,' and a genuine theatrical flair exhibited in telling stage effects attained through lighting, costume, music, and movements." After The Night of the Iguana (1961), Williams continued to write profusely---and constantly to revise his work---but it became more difficult to get productions of his plays and, if they were produced, to win critical or popular acclaim for them. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for these two and for The Glass Menagerie and The Night of the Iguana. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Awards and Honors
Awards
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Not About Nightingales
- Original title
- Not About Nightingales
- Original publication date
- 1998
- Dedication
- This play is dedicated to the memory
of Clarence Darrow, The Great Defender,
whose mental frontiers were the
four corners of the sky. - First words
- The action takes place in a large American prison during the summer of 1938. The conditions which the play presents are those of no particular prison but a composite picture of many.
- Publisher's editor
- Allean Hale (New Directions)
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 84
- Popularity
- 378,326
- Rating
- (4.00)
- Languages
- English, German
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 1
