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William Inge (b. 3 May 1913) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright who gained fame in the 1950s for his sensitive portraits of small-town life, often focusing on themes of repressed sexuality, loneliness, and the complexities of human relationships in the American heartland.
During his peak years in the 1950s, Inge achieved an unprecedented string of four consecutive Broadway hits -- Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), his breakout play about an alcoholic and his long-suffering wife which won a Tony award and an Oscar for Shirley Booth; Picnic (1953), which explored the upheaval caused by the arrival of a handsome vagabond in a small Kansas town -- it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and became an Oscar-winning hit film starring William Holden and Kim Novak; Bus Stop (1955), a bittersweet comedy famously adapted into a movie starring Marilyn Monroe; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), an autobiographical drama often considered his finest work, also adapted into a 1960 film starring Robert Preston, Dorothy McGuire, and an Oscar-nominated Shirley Knight. Inge also won an Academy Award for his original screenplay for Splendor in the Grass (1961), which starred Natalie Wood and featured the film debut of Warren Beatty.
In 1944, Inge was a St. Louis theater critic when he interviewed a young Tennessee Williams, preparing for the pre-opening run in Chicago of his The Glass Menagerie. Their encounter, which was fraught with the possibility of sex (did they or didn’t they?), catalyzed Inge's transition into becoming a playwright. Tennessee (just two years older but infinitely more experienced in all ways) became a mentor of sorts, and a life-long friend, but they also developed a complex, competitive rivalry (especially on Tennessee’s part) as they both achieved immense success in the 1950s.
Noted for his craftsmanship and the subtle fondness for his characters, almost all Inge’s major plays drew on his own upbringing and are set in Kansas, earning him the moniker “Playwright of the Midwest”. As a closeted gay man struggling with alcoholism and depression, his work often reflected his own feelings of isolation and social rejection. While his major works avoided depicting gay characters overtly, The Last Pad (1972), along with The Boy in the Basement (a one-act play written in the early 1950s but not published until 1962) and Where's Daddy? (1966) were three of Inge's plays that either had openly gay characters or addressed homosexuality directly.
After 1960, his plays like A Loss of Roses (filmed as The Stripper starring Joanne Woodard) and Natural Affection (directed by Tony Richardson) were poorly received by critics, leading him to fall into a deep depression. In his final years, he turned to fiction, writing two largely autobiographical novels -- Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971).
During the early 1970s, Inge lived in Los Angeles, where he taught playwriting at the University of California, Irvine. His last several plays attracted little notice or critical acclaim, and he fell into a deep depression, convinced he would never be able to write well again. He died of suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning on June 10, 1973, at the Hollywood home he shared with his sister, Helene. He was 60 years old.
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