Henry Schvey on Tennessee Williams and his St. Louis roots

Joining Steve Paul in our discussion of Missouri-based writers, we’re very pleased to welcome Henry Schvey, author of Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams.

In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life and extraordinary literary and theatrical career in the place that he lived in longest, and called home longer than any other—St. Louis, Missouri.

The question of this paradox lies at the heart of this book, an attempt not so much to correct the record about Williams’s well-chronicled dislike of the city, but rather to reveal how the city was absolutely indispensable to his formation and development both as a person and artist. Unlike the prevailing scholarly narrative that suggests that Williams discovered himself artistically and sexually in the deep South and New Orleans, Blue Song reveals that Williams remained emotionally tethered to St. Louis for a host of reasons for the rest of his life.

Born in New York City, Henry I. Schvey began his academic career at Leiden University in the Netherlands as a professor of English and American literature for fourteen years. During his time in Holland, he founded and became Artistic Director of a touring Dutch theatre company, the Leiden English Speaking Theatre (LEST). Since 1987, he has been professor of drama and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, and chaired the Performing Arts Department there for two decades from 1987-2007.  A stage director, playwright and memoirist, Schvey founded Washington University’s Shakespeare’s Globe program in conjunction with Globe Education in London, a program still running after more than thirty years.  As a scholar of modern American and European drama, he has published widely on playwrights including Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and David Mamet in addition to Tennessee Williams. Schvey is the author of three books, including Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.