Biography Essay

William Motter Inge was one of America's most successful playwrights during the 1950s. No American writer of serious drama has matched his unbroken series of critical and popular successes during that decade. Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) all portray lonely, frustrated people who struggle to find lasting love and happiness in small towns in Inge's native midwestern America. Despite similarities of character, theme, and setting in these plays, each one was eminently successful; moreover, each was made into a popular film, further enhancing the reputation of the former schoolteacher who was nearly thirty-seven years old when Come Back, Little Sheba premiered. As Robert Shuman noted about this stage of Inge's career, "Critics could do little but marvel at the success of a man who wrote modest plays about the most prosaic of people, but who...