Gentlemen Callers

Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Drama

M. Paller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9781403967756
• eBook ISBN:
  9781403979148
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Signs Are Interior
• 2 The Time and World That I Live In
• 3 Something Kept on Ice
• 4 A True Story of Our Time
• 5 Almost Willfully Out of Contact with the World
• 6 “Before My Clean Heart Has Grown Dirty …”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index