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Known as the “Playwright of the Midwest” with his portraits of small-town life and settings rooted in the American heartland, William Inge was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. $$PLAIN_TEXT_PREVIEW$$
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Celebrating the birth & legacy of
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“In the midst of such confusion as we find ourselves in today, where can we find sure values except in those very personal values that each man can sift from his own existence and cherish? I have tried to bring back into my play some very sustaining memories of people, in their sad, funny, futile, courageous and frightened ways of meeting life and trying to cope with it.”— William Inge
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William Inge was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who experienced an unprecedented string of hits on Broadway in the 1950s. With his portraits of small-town life and settings rooted in the American heartland, Inge became known as the "Playwright of the Midwest."
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He was born in Independence, Kansas on May 3, 1913, the youngest of five children of Luther Clay Inge, a traveling salesman and Maude Sarah Gibson-Inge with whom he had a close relationship. The small town of Independence had a profound influence on the young Inge and he would later attribute his understanding of human behavior to growing up in this small town environment. “I’ve often wondered how people raised in our great cities ever develop any knowledge of humankind. People who grow up in small towns get to know each other so much more closely than they do in cities,” said Inge.
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“I have never sought to write plays that primarily tell a story; nor have I sought deliberately to create new forms. I have been most concerned with dramatizing something of the dynamism I myself find in human motivations and behavior. I regard a play as a composition rather than a story, as a distillation of life rather than a narration of it.” — William Inge
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In 1935, Inge graduated from the University of Kansas at Lawrence with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Speech and Drama. He said once that at this stage in his life he had wanted to plunge into Broadway but felt that he lacked the necessary funding. Over the next few years, he started to work on his masters degree in Tennessee, but dropped out and returned home to Kansas where he worked as a laborer on the state highway, a news announcer and a teacher. Eventually, he completed his Masters of Arts Degree and became a member of the faculty at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. In 1943, he moved to St. Louis where he worked as the drama and music critic for the St. Louis Times and where he became acquainted with Tennessee Williams. He accompanied Williams to a performance of his play The Glass Menagerie in Chicago. "I was terrifically moved by the play," said Inge. "I thought it was the finest (play) I had seen in many years. I went back to St. Louis and felt, ‘Well, I’ve got to write a play.’" Within three months he had completed Farther Off From Heaven and then began serious work on turning a fragmentary short story into a one act play. This work evolved into Come Back, Little Sheba, the play that earned Inge the title of most promising playwright of the 1950 Broadway season.
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Three years later, Picnic opened on Broadway. Set in a small Kansas town on Labor Day, Rosemary, the spinster school teacher fears she will continue to live her life without someone to take care of her. Inge recalled the genesis of this character profile. "When I was a boy in Kansas, my mother had a boarding house. There were three women school teachers living in the house. I was four years old and they were nice to me; I liked them. I saw their attempts and, even as a child, I sensed every woman’s failure. I began to sense the sorrow and the emptiness in their lives and it touched me.” For Picnic, Inge was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, The Drama Critic Circle Award, The Outer Circle Award, and The Theatre Club Award. Inge’s next success came in 1955 with Bus Stop which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. |
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Inge’s fame continued to grow with The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), a reworking of his first play Farther Off From Heaven. It was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. Inge confessed the play was his "first cautious attempt to look at the past, with an effort to find order and meaning in experiences that were once too close to be seen clearly.” Many of his plays were adapted into critically acclaimed films including Come Back Little Sheba starring Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster; Picnic featuring William Holden, Kim Novak and Rosalind Russell;
Bus Stop featuring Marilyn Monroe, Don Murray and Eileen Heckart; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs starring Dorothy McGuire, Robert Preston, Shirley Knight, Eve Arden and Angela Lansbury. |
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In 1959, A Loss of Roses opened to poor reviews and closed after a three week run. Inge was devastated by the criticism. However in 1960, Inge's first screenplay, Splendor in the Grass was a triumph. The film starred Natalie Wood, Pat Hingle and newcomer Warren Beatty. Inge received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. His next two plays, Natural Affection (1963) and Where’s Daddy? (1965) were both unsuccessful prompting him to leave New York in 1963 at the age of fifty and move to California. In 1968, he resumed his teaching career at the University of California at Irvine but, becoming increasingly depressed, he quit in 1970. Inge also wrote two novels: Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971), a largely autobiographical account of Inge's boyhood years. After struggling with depression for many years, he committed suicide on June 10, 1973 at his home in Hollywood, where he lived with his sister, Helene. He was 60 years old. Inge’s plays are still a major part of the American Theatrical canon and are frequently revived. Since 1982, Independence Community College's William Inge Center for the Arts in his hometown, has sponsored the annual William Inge Theatre Festival to honor playwrights.
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“Some found in Mr. Inge's title The Dark at the Top of the Stairs a metaphor for the playwright's career, but Tennessee Williams once wrote that Mr. Inge's own life was the opposite—an odyssey ‘in which the stairs rise from darkness to light through something remarkably fine and gallant in his own nature.’”— The New York Times
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Portions of this biography were excerpted from William Inge Center for the Arts.
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Learn More About
WILLIAM INGE:
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We will celebrate the birth of William Inge with a performance from one of his plays by Actors Co-op company member, Tara Battani!
This performance will be delivered to you for safe viewing at home, via email. |
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