Leading Men

Leading Men is a biographical novel by the American writer Christopher Castellani, published in 2019.

The book opens in July 1953 at a party in Portofino given by Truman Capote, where the playwright Tennessee Williams and his partner, Frank Merlo, meet Anja Blomgren, a young Swedish woman who is unusually reticent about her own life. From there the novel follows the three of them across the following decade and beyond, through the productions and travels of a celebrated writer and through the affairs and loyalties of the people who made his work possible. Castellani is less interested in the plays than in what it cost to live beside the man who wrote them, and Merlo in particular is at the centre of the book: a partner, a secretary and, in the end, a person with a claim of his own on the story.

Castellani's earlier novels also deal with desire and ambition, and this one draws on the letters and memoirs of the period. The later sections move to Rome and to New York, and the relationship at the centre is treated as what made the work possible rather than as an appendix to it.