A short life of the author
William Inge was the playwright of the American heartland — a dramatist who, for a brief and brilliant period in the 1950s, gave the loneliness, sexual frustration, and thwarted desires of small-town Midwestern life a theatrical voice as powerful as anything produced by his more celebrated contemporaries Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. His four consecutive Broadway hits — Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) — constituted the most sustained commercial success of any American playwright in the decade, and his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass (1961) won the Academy Award. Yet Inge’s critical reputation collapsed in the 1960s as dramatically as it had risen in the 1950s, and his subsequent decline — marked by failed plays, alcoholism, depression, and ultimately suicide — constitutes one of the most poignant cautionary tales in the history of American drama.
Independence, Kansas
William Motter Inge was born in 1913 in Independence, Kansas — a small town on the prairie that would become the emotional landscape of virtually everything he wrote. His father was a traveling salesman; his mother was domineering and emotionally demanding. Inge was a shy, sensitive, closeted gay man in a culture that had no place for him, and the tension between his inner life and the conformist expectations of small-town Kansas became the defining subject of his work.
He attended the University of Kansas, taught high school English and drama, worked as a newspaper drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times, and did not begin writing plays until his thirties. His career was catalysed by a meeting with Tennessee Williams in 1944, when Inge, as a critic, interviewed Williams during the pre-Broadway tryout of The Glass Menagerie in St. Louis. Williams encouraged him to write, and the two became friends.
The Four Hits
Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) was Inge’s breakthrough — a two-character study of a marriage between Doc Delaney, a recovering alcoholic, and his wife Lola, a slovenly dreamer who mourns her lost youth and her lost dog, Little Sheba. The play was a quiet, devastating portrait of domestic despair, and Shirley Booth won the Tony Award (and later the Academy Award for the 1952 film) for her performance as Lola.
Picnic (1953) was Inge’s masterpiece and his greatest commercial success. Set in a small Kansas town on Labor Day weekend, the play depicted the disruption caused by the arrival of Hal Carter, a handsome, shiftless drifter whose physical magnetism exposes the sexual repression and emotional hunger of the town’s women. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was adapted into a successful 1955 film starring William Holden and Kim Novak.
Bus Stop (1955) was set in a Kansas roadside diner during a snowstorm, where a group of stranded travelers — including a naive cowboy and the nightclub singer he has kidnapped — are forced into confrontation. The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), Inge’s most autobiographical play, explored a family’s dysfunction in 1920s Oklahoma.
Splendor in the Grass
Inge’s screenplay for Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) — starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty — won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film, set in 1920s Kansas, told the story of two high school sweethearts whose sexual desires are destroyed by the moral repressiveness of their community, and it was Inge’s most explicit treatment of the theme that ran through all his work: the damage inflicted by a culture that denied and punished natural human desire.
The Decline
After The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Inge’s career collapsed. A Loss of Roses (1959) closed after twenty-five performances. Natural Affection (1963) was a critical failure. The reasons for the decline were multiple: the Broadway audience’s tastes shifted toward the absurdist and the experimental; Inge’s realistic, emotionally direct style seemed old-fashioned; and his personal life — alcoholism, depression, the impossible burden of maintaining a closeted gay identity in public life — left him increasingly unable to write.
He moved to Los Angeles, wrote two novels — Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971) — that were more sexually frank than his plays but commercially unsuccessful, and killed himself in 1973. He was sixty.
Collecting Inge
Picnic (Random House, 1953), as a Pulitzer Prize winner, is the primary collecting target. Come Back, Little Sheba (Random House, 1950), Bus Stop (Random House, 1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (Random House, 1958) are collected as a set. Four Plays (Random House, 1958) collects all four hits in a single volume. The novels are scarce and increasingly collected. Signed Inge material is rare because of his relatively short public career and reclusive later years.