Word: leverich
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Given so broad a range of distortions, his life presents a towering challenge to any biographer. Lyle Leverich, whom Williams chose as his official biographer before his death in 1983, has done a commendable job of combining skepticism and sleuthing. With gentleness and insight, he corrects many of the claims Williams set forth in his lively but unreliable memoirs. (Williams was especially prone to minimize the floundering and guilt of his early sexual encounters.) Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (Crown; 644 pages; $35) is the first installment of what will be a two-volume portrait. It tracks Williams from...
Readers who turn to books for escape from the dailiness of life will find little respite in Leverich's biography. He is a great one for minutiae--bills, appointments, schedules--as if by the sheer amassing of mundane detail he could arrest his notoriously flighty subject. The book is a solid job, but at times a weighty one--as dense as a memorial stone...
...Though Leverich's style has too much of the plod-and-pile of the worker ant, he does manage to capture the leaping grasshopper's heart of his subject. He brings to life the young man whose journals are a thicket of exclamation points and who wrote in praise of the "excessive romanticism which is youth and which is the best and purest part of life...