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3,347 words · no email, no account
No. 227 · Letters & Ideas · Literature
The Elysee Hotel
a biography of Thomas Lanier Williams III (Tennessee Williams)
What the book is
February 25, 1983, the Hotel Elysée on East 54th Street in Manhattan. Thomas Lanier Williams III, seventy-one, the playwright known as Tennessee, is found dead in his suite by his secretary John Uecker. The cause of death is recorded as asphyxiation from the cap of a Seconal bottle. He had been in physical decline for years and had been writing in his journal of his fear that he would die alone in a hotel room.
Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier — in Columbus, Mississippi, where Thomas was born in 1911, the second child of a travelling shoe salesman named Cornelius Williams and a minister's daughter named Edwina Dakin — and follows the arc through the long St. Louis Catholic and Episcopal childhood, the University of Missouri and Washington University and University of Iowa years, the long New Orleans bohemian 1939-1940 winter that gave the writer his pen-name, the 1944 The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, the 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire and the long Elia Kazan productions, the 1955 Pulitzer-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the long Frank Merlo partnership of 1948-1963 and Merlo's lung-cancer death, the long post-1963 critical-and-commercial decline, the long barbiturate-and-cocaine years of the late 1960s and 1970s, the 1979 Clothes for a Summer Hotel Broadway opening, and the February 1983 hotel room.
What emerges is a portrait of the Columbus, Mississippi-born American playwright whose Pulitzer-winning Streetcar and Cat established the post-war American theatre — and whose long late-career decline the same theatre took twenty years to bring itself to write about with the seriousness his early work had earned him.
At a glance
- Subject
- Thomas Lanier Williams III (Tennessee Williams)
- Shelf
- Letters & Ideas · Literature
- Written by
- Eleanor Whitlock
- Chapters
- 18 across 182 pages
- Narrated by
- Edmund Hartley
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- addiction · homophobia
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Rectory and the Diphtheria YearRead free
- 02Westminster Place and Cornelius2,702 words
- 03Mizzou and the Warehouse2,612 words
- 04Iowa, New Orleans, the Naming2,860 words
- 05Provincetown, Boston, Kip2,415 words
- 06The Lobotomy2,625 words
- 07The Glass Menagerie2,798 words
- 08Pancho, Hart Crane, the Streetcar2,829 words
- 09Frank Merlo, Key West, the Mad House2,968 words
- 10Orpheus, Suddenly Last Summer, the Garden District2,872 words
- 11Frank's Death and the Beginning of the Stoned Age2,751 words
- 12Tokyo, Yukio, the Critical Wilderness3,027 words
- 13Barnes, the Baptism, the Audrey Wood Break3,877 words
- 14Robert Carroll, Memoirs, the Late Companion3,449 words
- 15Edwina, Clothes, Something Cloudy, Something Clear3,928 words
- 16The Sunset Suite, the Smith Corona, the Last Weeks3,446 words
- 17The Discovery, 25 February 19834,104 words
- 18Calvary, Stony Lodge, the Coda3,942 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 182 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90623-152-9 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley
ISBN 979-8-90623-622-7
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Elysee Hotel about?
Thomas Lanier Williams III (Tennessee Williams). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Elysee Hotel — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,347 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 182 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
06Does this book carry content warnings?
Yes: addiction; homophobia. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.
The writer
This book deals with
- addiction
- homophobia
Listed before you buy, not after.
