William Inge

William Inge , 1913-73, American playwright, b. Independence, Kans., grad. Univ. of Kansas, 1935. He was a teacher and newspaper critic before he won recognition as a dramatist. Inge's plays portray sympathetically the aspirations and frustrations of small-town life in the Midwest. Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) established his reputation. It was followed by Picnic (1953; Pulitzer Prize), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). After the unsuccessful production of A Loss of Roses (1959) Inge's reputation as a dramatist declined; he turned to writing novels, notably Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970). He died in 1973, apparently a suicide.

Inge, William (1913–73), playwright. A writer who wrote knowingly of lonely, sexually obsessed but otherwise normal Midwesterners, he was born in Independence, Kansas, and educated at the University of Kansas. Inge was employed as a schoolteacher and as an actor before accepting the post of drama critic for the St. Louis Star‐Times in 1943, but he left the paper when his first play, Farther Off from Heaven (1947), was presented by Margo Jones at her Dallas theatre. It never reached New York, but his second play, Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) was an immediate success on Broadway. This was followed by three more successes: Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), the last a rewriting of his earlier Farther Off from Heaven. Thereafter, Inge's plays were failures, the critics sensing a certain limited sameness of outlook and subject as well as a falling away of theatricality in A Loss of Roses (1959), Glory in the Flower (1959), Natural Affection (1963), Where's Daddy? (1966), and The Last Pad (1970). His death was a suicide. Biography: A Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph, R. Voss, 1989.

Inge, William (1913–73), American dramatist, whose first success was Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), with Shirley Booth as the garrulous, pathetic, lonely wife of an alcoholic. Picnic (1953), which won the Pulitzer Prize, depicts the effect of an unemployed wanderer with powerful sexual magnetism on the women he meets in a Kansas town. It was followed by Bus Stop (1955), Inge's most cheerful work, again set in Kansas and bringing together a group of characters in a café used by bus passengers; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), originally produced in Dallas in 1947 as Farther Off from Heaven, and dealing with the sexual and other problems of a travelling salesman and his family in a small town in Oklahoma in the early 1920s. After these plays—all hits in New York, though little known in Britain except as films— Inge's career went into decline. A Loss of Roses (1959) was a failure, as were the plays which followed. Inge, though he had a vivid sense of the theatre, was somewhat too elementary in his approach to psychological problems.