Tennessee Williams lambasted his rivals as 'vampires'

His fellow playwrights are likened to "vampires" who leave "the stench smell of a rotting, overripe ego" on their productions. Tennessee Williams's vituperative comment is just one of his observations on writers, actors, directors and producers from the 1960s onwards that will be published in a new biography.

Although he had by then found fame with A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, subsequent theatrical flops and the loss of his lover, Frank Merlo, to cancer exacerbated his descent into drink and drugs.

Thirty years after his death, Williams's plays are among the most produced in the world, but the unpublished typed sheets, with handwritten amendments, date from an era when his struggle to repeat the success of his classic hits meant that he had to invest his own money to get his plays seen. Broadway was no longer interested.

In one of the unpublished manuscripts, Williams wrote of playwrights as "those unattractively awkward, embarrassed, graceless, blushing, fidgeting, shuffling, stammering, wretches". Elsewhere, he continued the tirade: "They are a bit like vampires. They want to get out of the actors and the directors everything that they couldn't put into their scripts because they are all, nearly always, the fiendish beggars of the arts … the sort of beggars that won't take no for an answer, but shriek with all their abused and abusing vanities for more, more, more.

"They drink too much, and if they don't drink, they are about as encouraging as a funeral director standing beside the doctor over the hospital bed of a patient."

Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life, which will be published this month, delves into the playwright's notebooks and papers. Its author, John Bak, drew on 1,000 pages of unpublished manuscripts. Bak said in the mid-1950s critics lost the stomach for the kind of theatre violence with which Williams had made his name, and audiences wanted light comedies or moral American melodramas about family issues, such as those on primetime television. Bak said: "Since 1955, he had veered off course – Baby Doll, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth. [In 1960, the critic] Marya Mannes wrote … that recent Broadway plays like his were 'snake pits' worthy only of a 'psychiatrist or a nurse in a mental institution'."

While Williams only named playwrights he respected, such as Pinter and Beckett, he does not identify those behind the commercial productions that he so detested.

Audiences too come in for hiscriticism. Regarding "Broadway society", he said of his audiences: "They are a marvellous audience, especially on a first night. They sit there attentive to every word of the script and every move of the players. Some people regard them as cultural cannibals. Untrue! It's unlikely that they have read the latest book of the avant-garde verse but, in their own microcosm, they are terrifically knowing. Their's is the applause that means the most to playwrights."

Noting actors' competitive streak, Williams wrote: "Some people are annoyed by their egoism or self-absorption. I have too much of that, myself, to be disturbed by it in others."