James Grissom has written for HBO, Showtime, CBS, and NBC. At a moment in the life of Tennessee Williams when he felt he had been relegated to a “lower artery of the theatrical heart,” when critics were proclaiming that his work had been overrated, he summoned to New Orleans a hopeful twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written an unsolicited letter to the great playwright asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on the playwright’s behalf to find out if he, Tennessee Williams, or his work, had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. This journey is chronicled in Grissom’s Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog (Knopf), which Publishers Weekly calls, “. . . a kaleidoscope meditation on the people that entered Williams’ imagination—“the fog”—to become his signature characters.”
