The Departments of English and Theatre welcome Ellen F. Brown, a freelance writer specializing in literary and theater history, to discuss her current project: a biography of playwright Tennessee Williams, at 4 pm on Tuesday, October 7 in Memorial Hall 127.

Brown’s talk entitled, “Tennessee Williams’ Later Years: Three Myths” addresses the mistaken notions that: (1) Williams’s later plays were all flops; (2) Williams led an unseemly life as an aging gay man; and (3) Willams failed to support the gay rights movement post-Stonewall.

Brown is currently writing a biography of playwright Tennessee Williams with a particular focus on the largely undocumented last twenty years of his life (1963 to 1983). She has conducted archival research at facilities across the country, including here at the University of Delaware, and interviewed over three hundred people who knew or were affiliated with Williams, including friends, relatives, neighbors, traveling companions, and professional colleagues – everyone from Academy Award–winning actors to the coroner who performed his autopsy. She has built a database of nearly two thousand unpublished letters written by Williams, many of them housed in private archives not available to prior researchers.

Although her project is still in the early stages, Brown’s research has already been cited in The New Yorker and a biography of Sylvia Plath. 

Brown has a law degree and an MFA in nonfiction writing. She is a member of Biographers International and The National Book Critics Circle.