INGE (ihnj)
American
author and playwright
Common clues: "Picnic"
playwright; Sheba creator William; “Bus Stop” writer;
“Splendor in the Grass” screenwriter; Playwright
William
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
5 times a year
Frequency
in English language:
38898 / 86800
Video: Splendor
in the Grass trailer
Originality is undetected plagiarism ~ William Ralph Inge
William Motter Inge (May 3, 1913 – June 10, 1973) was an American author and playwright, whose works feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations.
For
his small town settings, Inge earned the nickname "playwright
of the Midwest".
He began as a drama critic at the St. Louis Star-Times in 1943. With Tennessee Williams's encouragement, Inge wrote his first play, Farther Off from Heaven (1947), which was staged at the Margo Jones Theater, in Dallas, Texas. He wrote Come Back, Little Sheba while a teacher at Washington University in St. Louis from 1946 to 1949. It ran on Broadway for 190 performances in 1950, winning Tony Awards for Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer.
Inge's award-winning Picnic (1953) was based on women he had known as a small child: "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."
Picnic had a successful Broadway run from 19 February 1953 to 10 April 1954, and brought Inge a Pulitzer Prize. He followed with Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). All were adapted into major films. In 1961, he won an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for Splendor in the Grass.
Inge committed suicide in Los Angeles, California, in 1973. He has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "William Inge".
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