Fugitive Kind

Williams Tennessee

Summary

Social outcasts, misfit survivors, dangerous passions—Tennessee Williams fleshed out the characters and themes that would dominate his later work in Fugitive Kind, one of his earliest plays.
Fugitive Kind, one of Tennessee Williams's earliest plays, is one of his richest in dramatic material. Written in 1937 when the playwright was still Thomas Lanier Williams, Fugitive Kind introduces the character who will inhabit most of his later plays: the marginal man or woman who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive. Signature Tennessee Williams' characters, situations, and even the title (which was used as The Fugitive Kind for the 1960 film based on Orpheus Descending) have their genesis here. At age twenty-six, Williams was still learning his craft and this, his second full-length play, shows his debt to sources as diverse as thirties gangster films (The Petrified Forest, Winterset) and Romeo and Juliet. Fugitive Kind, with its star-crossed lovers and big city slum setting, takes place in a flophouse on the St. Louis waterfront in the shadow of Eads Bridge, where Williams spent Saturdays away from his shoe factory job and met his characters: jobless wayfarers on the dole, young writers and artists of the WPA, even gangsters and G-men. Fugitive Kind was also Williams's second play to be produced by The Mummers, a St. Louis theatre group devoted to drama of social protest. Called "vital and absorbing" by a contemporary review in The St. Louis Star-Times, this play reveals the young playwright's own struggle between his radical-socialist sympathies and his poetic inclinations, and signals his future reputation as our most compassionate lyric dramatist.

Available since: 06/17/2001.

Other books that might interest you

warm blooded things

Shaun Hill

Shaun Hill's debut poetry collection,warm blooded things is a radical and intimate encounter with boyhood, sexuality, and violence, love, desire and solitude. Wandering the nocturnal city streets, through random encounters, co-opting space and capturing conversations in a multitude of voices, this collection evokes alienation whilst longing for tenderness.
Hill's agile poems are alive to fear, loss and danger. The poems also explore a uniquely queer archive of time and place, the legacy of AIDS, and draw strength from giving voice to unheard histories. Seeking sanctuary and alternatives to a capitalist reality, these precise poems gesture towards hope, survival and the necessity to be responsible for one another.
"Shaun Hill is one of my favourite performers, his poems charged with vulnerability and raw intimacy. Now warm blooded things offers us this same tender gift."– Liz Berry

Show book

The Poetry of Birds

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily...

On a summer’s day we have perhaps all wish to take flight and view life and the world from the vantage point of a clear blue sky.  Our feathered friends do it as a matter of course and in this volume some of our finest wordsmith’s speak with imagination, longing and desire on their behalf.

Show book

Belfry Pigeon

Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis, also known as N. P. Willis, was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. For a time, he was the employer of former slave and future writer Harriet Jacobs. - Summary by Wikipedia

Show book

Unwritten - Caribbean Poems...

Karen McCarthy Woolf

With contributions from Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Kat Francois, Jay T. John, Anthony Joseph, Ishion Hutchinson, Charnell Lucien, Vladimir Lucien, Rachel Manley, Tanya Shirley and Karen McCarthy Woolf.
What does it mean to fight for a 'mother country' that refuses to accept you as one of its own? Britain's First World War poets changed the way we view military conflict and had a deep impact on the national psyche. Yet the stories of the 15,600 volunteers who signed up to the British West Indian Regiment remain largely unknown. Sadly, these citizens of empire were not embraced as compatriots on an equal footing. Instead they faced prejudice, injustice and discrimination while being confined to menial and auxiliary work, regardless of rank or status.
As a collaborative project, co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, BBC Contains Strong Language and the British Council, Unwritten Poemsinvited contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora poets to write into that vexed space, and explore the nature of war and humanity – as it exists now, and at a time when Britain's colonial ambitions were still at a peak. Unwritten: Caribbean Poems After the First World Waris a result of that provocation and also includes new material written for broadcast and live performance.

Show book

Kindertransport

Diane Samuels

A modern classic about one woman's struggle to come to terms with her past - brutally separated from her German Jewish parents at the age of 9 and brought to England with the promise of a new life. Kindertransport is a set text for GE Drama (AQA) and AS/A-Level English Literature (WJEC).
This edition also includes several personal memoirs by German-born children whose lives were saved, and transformed, by the Kindertransport.
Winner of the 1992 Verity Bargate Award
'Desperately harrowing... searing theatre that cuts across a continuum of suffering to the very heart of what unifies us as human' The Times
'A powerful contribution to Holocaust literature... presented with emotional clarity and intense sympathy' New Yorker

Show book

Bewilderment - New Poems and...

David Ferry

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. “This is one of the great books of poetry of this young century.”—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker To read David Ferry’s Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. “These poems highlight an age-old quest for truth that leads the speaker to consider his present and past, and to translate works by Horace, Virgil, Catullus and others . . . vivid and sometimes heartbreaking.”—The Washington Post “Astonishing—a haunted book where ghosts prove that the haunted are still alive and allow for the continuing company of literature.”—Slate “A necessary book . . . shocking and heartbreaking.”—The Rumpus

Show book