William Inge
Dramas of American playwright William Motter Inge explored the expectations and fears of small-town Midwesterners; his play Picnic (1953) won a Pulitzer Prize.
Works of this novelist typically feature solitary protagonists, encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, Broadway produced a memorable string. Inge rooted his portraits of life and settings in the heartland.
If you like author William Inge here is the list of authors you may also like
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Alice Childress
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American playwright, actor, and author.
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She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit comedy Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history. Alice also became involved in social causes. She formed an off- -
Theresa Rebeck
Theresa Rebeck is a playwright. She also works as a television writer. Her input went into popular shows such as Dream On, Brooklyn Bridge, L.A. Law, American Dreamer, Maximum Bob, First Wave, and Third Watch.
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She also wrote and produced Canterbury’s Law, Smith, Law and Order: Criminal Intent and NYPD Blue.
Ms. Rebeck has an MFA in Playwrighting and a PhD. in Victorian Melodrama, from Brandeis University. She is a board member of the Dramatists Guild and has taught at Brandeis and Columbia Universities.
She currently resides in Brooklyn with her husband Jess Lynn and two children, Cooper and Cleo. -
August Wilson
American playwright August Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for Fences in 1985 and for The Piano Lesson in 1987.
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His literary legacy embraces the ten series and received twice for drama for The Pittsburgh Cycle . Each depicted the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience, set in different decade of the 20th century.
Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman from North Carolina, in the hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bore Frederick August Kittel, Junior, the fourth of six children, to Frederick August Kittel, Senior, a German immigrant baker. From North Carolina, maternal grandmother of Wilson earlier sought a better life and walked to Pennsylvania. After his fifth year, his mother raised the childr -
N. Richard Nash
Nathan Richard Nusbaum , known as N. Richard Nash, was an American writer and dramatist best known for writing Broadway shows, including "The Rainmaker".
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Through the course of his lifetime, he wrote four plays, twelve screenplays, eight novels, two books on philosophy ("The Athenian Spirit" and "The Wounds of Sparta") and a book of poetry ("Absalom").
"The Rainmaker" was adapted into the 1956 film "The Rainmaker" starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn. His 1975 novel "Cry Macho" was adapted to film in 2021 and starred Clint Eastwood and Dwight Yoakam.
He passed away on December 11, 2000 at the age of 87. -
Frederick Knott
Knott was the son of English missionaries who sent him to be educated in England. A graduate of Cambridge, his promising tennis career was cut short by WWII. He served in the British Army Artillery as a signals instructor. He eventually moved to New York, and found success with three stories he wrote for the British and American stage.
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Mark Medoff
Mark Medoff was an American playwright, screenwriter, film and theatre director, actor, and professor. His play Children of a Lesser God received both the Tony Award and the Olivier Award. He was nominated for an Academy Award and a Writers Guild of America Best Adapted Screenplay Award for the film script of Children of a Lesser God.
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Neil Simon
Marvin Neil Simon was an American playwright and screenwriter. He wrote more than 30 plays and he received more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer. He was one of the most reliable hitmakers in Broadway history, as well as one of the most performed playwrights in the world. Though primarily a comic writer, some of his plays, particularly the Eugene Trilogy and The Sunshine Boys, reflect on the twentieth century Jewish-American experience.
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Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 14, 1963) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. Odets was born in Philadelphia to Louis Odets (born Gorodetsky) and Pearl Geisinger, Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high school after two years to become an actor. In 1931, he became a founding member of the Group Theatre, a highly influential New York theatre company that utilized an acting technique new to the United States. This technique was based on the system devised by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski. It was further developed by Group Theatre director Lee Strasberg and became known as The Method or Method Acting. Odets eventually
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Terence Rattigan
Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan, CBE was a British dramatist. He was one of England's most popular mid twentieth century dramatists. His plays are typically set in an upper-middle-class background. He is known for such works as The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Separate Tables (1954), among many others.
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A troubled homosexual, who saw himself as an outsider, his plays "confronted issues of sexual frustration, failed relationships and adultery", and a world of repression and reticence. -
Anton Chekhov
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of humans to communicate.
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Born ( Антон Павлович Чехов ) in the small southern seaport of Taganrog, the son of a grocer. His grandfather, a serf, bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. He also taught to read. A cloth merchant fathered Yevgenia Morozova, his mother.
"When I think back on my childhood," Chekhov recalled, "it all seems quite gloomy to me." Tyranny of his father, religious fanaticism, and long nights in the store, open from five in the morning till midnight, shadowed his early years. He attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog from 1867 -
Tracy Letts
Tracy Letts is an American playwright and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County.
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Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to best-selling author Billie Letts, of Where The Heart Is and The Honk And Holler Opening Soon fame, and the late college professor and actor Dennis Letts. His brother Shawn is a jazz musician and composer. He also has a brother Dana. Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma and graduated from Durant High School in the early 1980s. He moved to Dallas, where he waited tables and worked in telemarketing while starting as an actor. He acted in Jerry Flemmons' O Dammit!, which was part of a new playwrights series sponsored by Southern Methodist University.
Letts moved to Chicago at the ag -
Alice Childress
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American playwright, actor, and author.
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She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit comedy Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history. Alice also became involved in social causes. She formed an off- -
Richard Connell
Richard Edward Connell, Jr. was an American author and journalist, best known for his short story "The Most Dangerous Game." Connell was one of the best-known American short story writers of his time and his stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's Weekly. Connell had equal success as a journalist and screenwriter. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1942 for best original story for the film Meet John Doe.
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Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American musical and film composer and lyricist, winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards (seven, more than any other composer), multiple Grammy Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has been described as the Titan of the American Musical.
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His most famous scores include (as composer/lyricist) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Assassins, as well as the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy. He was president of the Dramatists Guild from 1973 to 1981. -
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American dramatist and screenwriter famously blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–52.
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Hellman was praised for sacrificing her career by refusing to answer questions by HUAC; but her denial that she had ever belonged to the Communist Party was easily disproved, and her veracity was doubted by many, including war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and literary critic Mary McCarthy.
She adapted her semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes into a screenplay which received an Academy Award nomination in 1942.
Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Ham -
Neil Simon
Marvin Neil Simon was an American playwright and screenwriter. He wrote more than 30 plays and he received more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer. He was one of the most reliable hitmakers in Broadway history, as well as one of the most performed playwrights in the world. Though primarily a comic writer, some of his plays, particularly the Eugene Trilogy and The Sunshine Boys, reflect on the twentieth century Jewish-American experience.
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Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.
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For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton... -
John Osborne
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People best know British playwright John James Osborne, member of the Angry Young Men, for his play Look Back in Anger (1956); vigorous social protest characterizes works of this group of English writers of the 1950s.
This screenwriter acted and criticized the Establishment. The stunning success of Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than four decades, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and television. His extravagant and iconoclastic personal life flourished. He notoriously used language of the ornate violence on behalf of the political causes that he supported and against his own family, including his wives and children, who nevertheless often gave as good as they g -
Ed McBain
"Ed McBain" is one of the pen names of American author and screenwriter Salvatore Albert Lombino (1926-2005), who legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952.
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While successful and well known as Evan Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956.
He also used the pen names John Abbott, Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, Ezra Hannon, Dean Hudson, Evan Hunter, and Richard Marsten. -
Arthur Miller
Works of American playwright Arthur Asher Miller include Death of a Salesman (1949), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Crucible (1953).
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This essayist, a prominent figure in literature and cinema for over 61 years, composed a wide variety, such as celebrated A View from the Bridge and All My Sons , still studied and performed worldwide. Miller often in the public eye most famously refused to give evidence to the un-American activities committee of the House of Representatives, received award for drama, and married Marilyn Monroe. People at the time considered the greatest Miller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_... -
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.
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Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not ap -
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.
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Euripides
Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
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Eur -
Robert E. Sherwood
Robert Emmet Sherwood was an American playwright, editor, and screenwriter.
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Joseph Kramm
Joseph A. Kramm (30 September 1907, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 8 May 1991) was an American playwright, actor, and director. He received Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1951 for his play The Shrike, later adapted into a motion picture of the same title in 1955.
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Owen Gould Davis
Owen Gould Davis, Sr., who published variously under the names Owen Davis and Ike Swift, was an American dramatist who received the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Icebound . He was the father of actor Owen Davis Jr., and screenwriter Donald Davis.
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Zoë Akins
Zoë Byrd Akins was an American playwright, poet, and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for drama. Born in 1886 in Missouri, she was home-schooled during her early years. She then attended the Monticello Seminary in Godfrey, Illinois, and Hosmer Hall in St. Louis. She lived in St. Louis for many years and wrote poetry and criticism for the magazine Reedy's Mirror as well as other, better-known publications of that era. Akins wrote about 40 plays, beginning in 1914 with Papa, a comedy. Subsequent works included The Magical City, which was performed by the Washington Square Players in the 1915-16 season and her first big hit, Declassée, which ran on Broadway in the 1919-20 season and was twice adapted into films.
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Akins' play Daddy's Gone A-Hunti -
George Kelly
George Edward Kelly (16 January 1887 – 18 June 1974) was an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He began his career in vaudeville as an actor and sketch writer. He became best known for his satiric comedies, including The Torch-Bearers (1922) and The Show-Off (1924).
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Kelly was born in Philadelphia, the second of ten children of Mary Ann (Costello) and John Henry Kelly, Irish immigrants. He was the brother of American businessperson and Olympic champion sculler John B. Kelly Sr. and the uncle of actress Grace Kelly and rower John B. Kelly Jr. Not much is known about his early life, but he was an actor in his early years. He did not like the dramatic material available during the turn of the century, and wanted to change th