Tenn at One Hundred

Tenn at One Hundred, edited by David Kaplan, is a comprehensive look at the reputation of America’s greatest playwright. Published on the occasion of Tennessee Williams’ centennial, these eighteen essays—by authors including John Lahr, William Jay Smith, Sam Staggs, Amiri Baraka, John Patrick Shanley, and Allean Hale—explore the man and his legacy: the plays, films, reviews, talent, tenacity, good fortune, bad timing, friends, addictions, critics, producers, publishers, directors, actors, and biographers that helped to shape Williams’ critical reputation and iconic status over the past seventy years.Best known for the groundbreaking plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, Williams began his writing career in the 1930s as a struggling and unknown poet. At the time of his death in 1983, he was the most produced playwright in the country and one of the most ridiculed American writers. What were the events and decisions that created these conflicting extremes of reputation? How did Williams come to be known as one the most shocking writers of the post-war era while he was also lauded as America’s “poet of human heart”? Tenn at One Hundred is the first book to attempt to answer these questions and to begin re-assessing Williams’ reputation.

David Kaplan is the author of the book TENNESSEE WILLIAMS IN PROVINCETOWN and various articles about Williams, Eudora Welty, Japanese poetry, and Shakespeare productions in Central Asia. He is the co-founder and curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, now in its sixth year. As a stage director, Mr. Kaplan has staged the world premieres of Williams' “The Day on Which a Man Dies” (in Chicago), “The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View” (in Boston) and productions of “Eccentricities of a Nightingale” (in Cantonese at the Hong Kong Rep), “Suddenly Last Summer” (in Russian, at the Gorky Theater in Samara Russia.