When William Inge began writing Come Back, Little Sheba in the summer of 1948, he was thirty five years old. Six foot tall, blond haired, blue eyed, he was working as a largely anonymous professor at Washington University in St. Louis with dreams of becoming a successful playwright. The spark of that desire came three years earlier after a chance encounter with another then unknown playwright, Tennessee Williams. Inge interviewed Williams for a local Missouri paper, and after seeing Williams’ initial production of The Glass Menagerie in Chicago months later, Inge went home and quickly wrote the play Farther Off From Heaven.
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