Trivia

An annual festival, the William Inge Theatre Festival, is held each year in his hometown of Independence, KS. The Festival honors playwrights and brings national and international theatre artists to this small rural town each spring. America's finest playwrights have all made the pilgrimmage to the Festival. www.ingefestival.org

William Inge won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play "Picnic".

His play, "Come Back, Little Sheba," in a Manhattan Theatre Club presentation of a Center Theatre Group production on Broadway in New York City was nominated for a 2007-2008 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.

Namesake of the University of Kansas Department of Theatre and Film's William Inge Memorial Theatre, a 50' square "black box" that seats 135. It is used primarily for student productions.

In the early 1970's he was teaching playwriting at the University of California - Irvine.

Three Inge works, Bus Stop (1956), Splendor in the Grass (1961), and Bus Riley's Back in Town (1965), are based upon one act plays written by Inge before he achieved success on Broadway: "People in the Wind," "Glory in the Flower," and "Bus Riley's Back in Town".

In 1973 Inge taught at Jack Garfein's Actors and Directors Lab in Beverly Hills. Garfein was called to Inge's residence in the Hollywood Hills the night he died.

Inge is a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame, inducted posthumously in 1979.

Was nominated for two Tony Awards as the author of Best Play nominees: in 1956 for "Bus Stop" and in 1958 for "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs."

Inge was educated at his hometown Independence Community College, the University of Kansas at Lawrence and at the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tenn. He taught high school from 1937 to 1949.

In 1943, while teaching, he became the drama critic at the St. Louis Star-Times, where he met Tennessee Williams. With Williams' encouragement, he wrote his first play, "Farther Off from Heaven (1947)," which was staged at Margo Jones's Theatre '47 in Dallas, Texas. Later, he revised it for Broadway as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960).

The William Inge Family Home is located at 514 N. 4th St. in Independence, Kansas. Owned by the William Inge Festival Foundation, it is used by visiting artists working with the Inge Center for the Arts and Independence Community College, as well as for Inge Festival performances and other events. Since 2002, more then 50 guest artists have lived at the Inge House for extended residencies.

Was a close friend of Barbara Baxley. The Barbara Baxley papers at the New York Public Library Archives document their relationship.

From the New York Times June 11, 1973 obituary for Inge: "Some found in Mr. Inge's title 'The Dark at the Top of the Stairs' a metaphor for the playwright's career, but Tennessee Williams once wrote that Mr. Inge's own life was the opposite-an odyssey in which the stairs rise from darkness to light through something remarkably fine and gallant in his own nature'".

Inge has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.