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William Inge habitually introduced psychological themes into his plays, and later into his two novels. Inge was in analysis himself for more than twenty years. He began analysis probably in 1950, during the run of his first Broadway success, Come Back, Little Sheba. He wrote that his friends did not understand why he had done so, “as though successful people automatically became happy.”1
In fact, William Inge was not a happy man. He suffered from fears, phobias, and most of all from a killing identification with his work which he called “something of the very essence of his [the playwright's] own life. If [the play] is rejected, he can only feel that he is rejected, too.”2 His last full-length plays were rejected in New York, and he fled to Hollywood, writing one award-winning screenplay, Splendor in the Grass, and one-act plays which did not achieve the kind of prominence he wanted for his work.
Before his suicide in 1973, he also wrote two novels, both of which drew heavily on earlier characters and themes from more successful pieces. The first novel, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, was criticized by one reviewer for reading like an “outline for one of his plays.” The main characters were developed in depth but in “a playwright's depth.”3 The second novel, My Son Is a Splendid Driver, with its frequent changes of scene, shifts of character and broad time-span similarly reads more like a film script.
Two of his most clearly autobiographical works, are: The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and My Son Is a Splendid Driver.4 The first, his last successful Broadway play, was based on Farther