MS 01 William Motter Inge Digital Collections - Inge's Works

The series of Inge's Works consists of various versions of works by Inge, filed in alphabetical order by title. This structure permits researchers to view all drafts through to final versions of Inge's works. Any prior arrangement information is retained, and materials shall be accessible in a more streamlined manner than under the previous arrangement. This will be most apparent to the user in the Plays, Novels and Screenplays sub-series. Links to digital surrogates of these collection materials are or will soon be included in this finding aid.

The series of Inge's Works includes four hundred manuscripts written by William Motter Inge. Manuscripts include full length plays, screenplays, one-act plays, novels and short stories. Various versions of all the Broadway plays are included in the Collection, as well as some of the earlier produced plays and one-act plays that were to become successful Broadway plays. For example, Farther Off From Heaven and Front Porch, which were written in the 1940’s, were revised by Inge in the 1950’s and became The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Picnic respectively. A one-act play, People in the Wind, was expanded and became the popular Broadway play, Bus Stop.

In addition to various versions of the Broadway plays, the Collection has versions of many of the other one-act plays that have either been produced or published. Included in the Collection are versions of the various screenplays such as Splendor in the Grass, versions of the novels Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff and My Son is a Splendid Driver, and some unpublished short stories.

To complement the Collection of original manuscripts are the published works, including many translations. In addition, there are over one hundred critical and biographical sources and over fifty theatre programs, including the playbill copy for all of the Broadway productions and programs from significant non-Broadway presentations.

A unique feature of Inge’s plays is that several have become successful motion pictures. The Dickinson Foundation of Mission, Kansas, has provided the Collection with copies of 16-mm movies of Bus Stop, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and The Stripper (which is based on the play A Loss of Roses) and Splendor in the Grass. In 1982, Home Box Office, Inc., gave the Collection videocassettes of its theatre production of Bus Stop.

Along with the motion pictures and television plays are many motion picture lobby cards, posters, still pictures and pressbooks. All of the motion picture versions of Inge’s plays are represented in this collection of materials, including Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The Stripper, Splendor in the Grass, Bus Riley’s Back in Town and All Fall Down, a screenplay adaptation by Inge of James Leo Herlihy’s novel by the same title. Still pictures of various actors and actresses like Shirley Booth, William Holden, Rosalind Russell, Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty and many others are in the Collection.