Even at his dissolute worst, his writing is so much more vivid than Lahr’s, which is exceptionally fluent when not on an alliterative tear.

To judge by Williams’ prose style, his addiction to books must at some point have matched his later dependence on less salubrious substances. He even reduces Carson McCullers to an occasional walk-on role, while hangers-on are inventoried with tedious rigor. Lahr shows little interest in this dimension of Williams’ artistic identity (despite mentioning Williams’ explicit request to be buried at sea so that his bones can rest beside Crane’s). Harold Bloom has called Williams “the most literary of our major dramatists,” a direct descendant of Hart Crane in both poetic intensity and self-destructive fervor. Lahr retraces Williams’ background but gives short shrift to something vital - Williams’ development as a writer. The 34-year-old playwright would never know obscurity again after the 1945 opening of “The Glass Menagerie,” a true watershed moment in the American theater. Lahr initially intended to write a second volume to Lyle Leverich’s “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams” but decided with his publisher to opt for a stand-alone work, beginning pretty much where Leverich left off, at the dawn of Williams’ Broadway career.

Just, Williams’ “Five O’clock Angel” and formidable literary gatekeeper, he lavishes us with Williams’ phrase-making color. Lahr has a positive genius for quotations, and with access to Williams’ own letters and journals, long since freed from the heavy hand of the late Lady Maria St. This high-toned showbiz biography teems with larger-than-life Broadway personalities and their raffish kind.

John lahr tennessee williams