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“Fortunately, there are also a great many people who don’t think of me as a bum; a lot of them think of me as Tennessee Ernie Ford!” —Tennessee Williams, Playboy, 1973 Toward the end of his life, Tennessee Williams sensed that, despite the enormous extent of his published and produced dramatic work and his numerous professional prizes, he remained outside the general American culture, his very name confused with that of a country and western singer.1 To some writers familiar with his work, even his acceptability within the academic literary world appeared questionable . The following, from Evolving Texts: The Writing of Tennessee Williams, the catalogue of a collection of Williams papers and artifacts published at the University of Delaware Library in 1988, illustrates this academic attitude: This approach re®ects the uneasy niche Williams and his writing occupied in the scholarly world throughout his career. He was a playwright of emotions rather than ideas; his work, especially the ¤lms which were adapted from his plays, brought him a great deal of commercial success; ¤nally, and perhaps most crucially, Tennessee Williams, the public ¤gure, eventually overshadowed his own work. . . . the scholarly world came to regard him as a popular author. All of these factors have helped to diminish Williams’s critical reputation as a writer. (5–6) 10 “It’s Another Elvis Sighting, and . . . My God . . . He’s with Tennessee Williams!” Barbara M. Harris By the 1990s, however, things had begun to change drastically. Using elements of cultural theory to facilitate interpretation, I will argue here that at the millennium both Tennessee Williams and his works have risen phoenixlike to the status of popular American icons. Before I present evidence of Williams’s rise, however, I will offer a brief review of reactions to Williams and his oeuvre during and after the 1960s. This review will be helpful, especially as it contrasts with the treatment of Williams today in both popular and specialized media. “Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable,” Blanche tells Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire.2 Tennessee Williams endured a lot of cruelty from writers who evaluated his works from the late 1960s until the time of Williams’s death in 1983. Deliberate or not, many “critics” incorporated ad hominem attacks on Williams in reviews of his works or quarreled with a style he attempted to make organic to his purpose by incorporating words in their reviews like “silly” and “trivial,” words too amorphous to be enlightening. Anthony West, later in the same review from which I quoted above, says, “There is a sad moment in the career of an artist of the second rank, a point of no return, beyond which his work ceases to develop.”3 Such comments , arguably, have no place in a productive discourse of “literature and theater,” in which West says he is participating;4 and therefore are conscious in their cruelty. Even before these words, written in 1963, Williams found himself censured by satire. Probably because of the popularity of 1950s ¤lms made from his work, the second annual edition of the comic book The Worst from Mad satirized Tennessee Williams in 1959. In “Sin-Doll Ella,” the comic book juxtaposed the Cinderella story with the world of Williams . Featured in addition to the notorious “Baby Doll” were caricatures of Burl Ives as “Big Daddy,” Marlon Brando as “Stanley Kowalski ,” and Anna Magnani as “Sera¤na delle Rose.” Nonetheless, though academia was slow to publish literary criticism of Williams, 1961 saw three excellent books of serious Williams criticism and scholarship: Nancy M. Tischler’s Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan ; Signi Falk’s Tennessee Williams; and Benjamin Nelson’s Tennessee Williams: The Man and His Work. The tide of critical acceptance, at ¤rst so promising, however, was about to recede. On December 28, 1961, Williams’s The Night of the Iguana opened on Broadway, later winning Williams his fourth and last New York Drama Critics’ “It’s Another Elvis Sighting” 179 Circle Award. The equally successful ¤lm version appeared in 1964. Though other Williams plays would open on Broadway, The Night of the Iguana represented Williams’s last successful Broadway play, and the ¤lm version was the last Williams ¤lm to be well received by the critics. Though Williams, after 1961 and until his death in 1983, appeared to have a certain amount of celebrity, especially on the East Coast, he seems to have dropped from the general cultural scene. Furthermore, with a few outstanding academic exceptions during the 1970s, such as Ruby...

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