Childhood of William Motter Inge in Kansas it is reflected in many of his works. Born in Independence on May 3, 1913, he was the second child of Luther Clay Inge and Maude Sarah Gibson-Inge and the youngest of five siblings. Her father was a street vendor and Inge had a close relationship with her mother.
Independence, Kansas, in the 1920s, was a wealthy white-collar town and the home of Alf Landon, Harry Sinclair, and Martin Johnson. Until the depression, Indepdendence was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other city in the country.
The fascination of Inge by the theater started early. In the 1920s, Independence had many cultural events where top performers and shows stopped for an evening between performances in Kansas City, Missouri and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Even if Inge He was not from a wealthy family, he did get to watch many shows as a member of a local Boy Scout Troop. The troop met in the Civic Center, a meeting room on the ground floor of Memorial Hall, a large 2,000-seat theater where these shows were held, and scouts were regularly invited to watch the performances.
The small town of Independence had a profound influence on the young Inge and later he would attribute his understanding of human behavior to growing up in this small town setting. Later, Inge would use this knowledge of small town life in many of her works, most of which revolve around characters who are clearly products of small towns like Independence.
In 1930, Inge He graduated from Independence High School and attended Independence Junior College (now Independence Community College). At the time, the high school and college were located side by side at 10th and Laurel streets.
In 1935, Inge He graduated from the University of Kansas at Lawrence with a BA in Speech and Drama. He once said that at this stage in his life he had wanted to immerse himself in Broadway, but felt that he lacked the necessary funds. When the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, offered him a scholarship to work on a master’s degree, he accepted. He later left Peabody. “Somehow I based my life on the theater“, He said. “Having given up the theater, I had given up the foundation I had established for my life. He was terribly confused. I went to my house in Kansas and started to stagger“.
Back in Kansas, he strove to define a clearer direction for his life. He found physical exhaustion helpful and that summer he worked as a laborer on the state highway. After that he went to Wichita, where he worked as a newscaster. In 1937-38, he taught English and drama at Columbus, Kansas high school, and in 1938 he returned to Peabody to complete his Master of Arts. From 1938-1943, he was a faculty member at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.
In 1953, Picnic premiered at The Music Box Theater in New York City. The play takes place in a small town in Kansas on Labor Day. Rosemary, the spinster school teacher, is afraid to continue living her life without someone taking care of her. Picnic won the Pulitzer Prize, The Drama Critic Circle Prize, the Outer Circle Prize, and The Theater Club Prize.
In 1959, “A loss of roses“It premiered to negative reviews and went down the bill after three weeks. Inge was devastated by the criticism. In 1960 he announced plans to teach at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. These plans and all subsequent plans to return to his home state failed despite the fact that he later purchased property in Lawrence.
Splendor in the grass it was a triumph for Inge and won her an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. His next two works were “Natural affection“in 1963 and”Where’s daddy?“in 1965. Both failed. This led him to leave New York in 1963 at the age of fifty and move to California.
In 1968, he resumed his teaching career at the University of California at Irvine but, increasingly depressed, he resigned in 1970. The products of his remaining years were two novels: Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff in 1970 and My son is a splendid driver in 1971, a largely autobiographical account of his childhood years.
Inge He committed suicide on June 10, 1973 at his home in Hollywood, where he lived with his sister Helene. He was buried in the Monte de la Esperanza Cemetery in his hometown of Independence, Kansas. His headstone simply reads: “Playwright.”