A trajetória de Tennessee Williams em dicionários biográficos documentais: uma leitura crítica e dialética

The article critically examines how the trajectory and critical reception of the American playwright and writer Tennessee Williams were shaped by censorship, canonization, and erasure throughout the Twentieth Century. Through a dialectical reading of documentary volumes, especially the Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, it demonstrates that his consecration as a tragic genius functioned as an ideological strategy of political and biographical neutralization. By comparing archives, catalogs, and other publications, the study reveals the literary canon as a field of dispute between memory and forgetting. It concludes that the revaluation of marginal materials and Williams’s late plays restores to his work its aesthetic complexity and critical insurgency, transforming the archive into an active instrument of cultural resistance and historical reinterpretation.