In this gripping biography Paul Ibell discusses Williams as a poet as well as a playwright, at the same time revealing the crises of doomed relationships, promiscuous sex, alcohol and prescription drug abuse that gave the writer the raw material for his plays, but which ultimately destroyed him. Ibell champions the playwright's later work, whose regular and, he argues, unjustified maulings by critics drove Williams further into decline. Ibell also emphasizes the importance of Europe in the imagination of a writer who is best known for plays set in the American South.