Tennessee Williams Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950)
  2. Moise and the World of Reason (1975)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays (1945)
  2. One Arm and Other Stories (1948)
  3. Hard Candy (1954)
  4. Four Plays (1956)
  5. The Rose Tattoo and Other Plays (1957)
  6. Baby Doll and Other Plays (1958)
  7. Three Players Of A Summer Game, And Other Stories (1960)
  8. Five Plays (1962)
  9. In the Winter of Cities (1964)
  10. American Blues (1965)
  11. A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays (1965)
  12. The Knightly Quest (1966)
  13. Dragon Country (1970)
  14. Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974)
  15. Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977)
  16. It Happened the Day the Sun Rose (1983)
  17. Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays (1984)
  18. Collected Stories (1985)
  19. Baby Doll & Tiger Tail (1991)
  20. The Collected Poems (2002)
  21. Tales of Desire (2010)

Collection of Plays In Publication Order

  1. Candles to the Sun (1936)
  2. The Magic Tower (1936)
  3. Fugitive Kind (1937)
  4. The Palooka (1937)
  5. Spring Storm (1937)
  6. Battle of Angels (1940)
  7. The Glass Menagerie (1945)
  8. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
  9. Summer and Smoke (1948)
  10. Camino Real (1948)
  11. The Rose Tattoo (1951)
  12. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
  13. Baby Doll (1956)
  14. Orpheus Descending (1957)
  15. A Perfect Analysis Given By a Parrot. (1958)
  16. Suddenly Last Summer (1958)
  17. Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
  18. The Night of the Iguana (1961)
  19. Period of Adjustment (1961)
  20. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963)
  21. The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1964)
  22. Kingdom of Earth (1968)
  23. Small Craft Warnings (1972)
  24. The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975)
  25. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, volume 5 (1976)
  26. The Two-Character Play (1979)
  27. Vieux Carré (1979)
  28. A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979)
  29. Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1981)
  30. The Long Goodbye (1992)
  31. Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1995)
  32. Not About Nightingales (1998)
  33. Stairs to the Roof (2000)
  34. Gentlemen Callers (2005)
  35. Summer At the Lake (2020)
  36. The Fat Man’s Wife (2020)
  37. Adam and Eve on a Ferry (2020)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Memoirs (1975)
  2. Tennessee Williams’ Letters To Donald Windham, 1940 1965 (1976)
  3. Five O’Clock Angel (1990)
  4. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: 1920-1945 (2000)
  5. Notebooks (2007)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Collection of Plays Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Tennessee Williams Books Overview

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as ‘Splendidly written, precise, short, complete and fine.’ It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow, recently a famous stage beauty, but now ‘drifting.’ The novel opens soon after her husband’s death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging ‘The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.’ With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: ‘As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skilled as his plays.’ Publishers Weekly

27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays

The thirteen one act plays collected in this volume include some of Tennessee Williams’s finest and most powerful work. They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater. Only one of these plays The Purification is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house The Lady of Larkspur Lotion or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman The Last of My Solid Gold Watches or of delinquent children This Property is Condemned, his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue. Mr. Williams’s views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, ‘Something wild…
,’ which serves as an introduction to this collection.

Four Plays

This anthology contains four of the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright’s most brilliant works: Summer and Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer and Period of Adjustment. ‘The innocent and the damned, the lonely and the frustrated, the hopeful and the hopeless…
Williams brings them all into focus with an earthy, irreverently comic passion.’ Newsweek.

Baby Doll and Other Plays

Tennessee Williams’ famous and controversial Hollywood screenplay ‘Baby Doll’ opens with Archie Lee’s teenage bride driving him to distraction, as she has refused to consummate their marriage until the day of her twentieth birthday. Enter wily Sicilian Silva Vaccaro, Archie’s rival both in the cotton business and for the fluffy affections of flirtatious Baby Doll, and the steamy tension rapidly reaches breaking point. ‘Make no mistake about it,’ wrote John Osborne, ‘this Baby Doll kid is a killer’.

American Blues

Five Plays by Tennessee Williams : Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry, The Dark Room, The Case of the Crushed Petunias: A Lyrical Fantasy, The Long Stay Cut Short, or, The Unsatisfactory Supper, Ten Blocks on the Camino Real: A Fantasy,

A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays

‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ is one of the most remarkable plays of our time. It created an immortal woman in the character of Blanche DuBois, the haggard and fragile southern beauty whose pathetic last grasp at happiness is cruelly destroyed. It shot Marlon Brando to fame in the role of Stanley Kowalski, a sweat shirted barbarian, the crudely sensual brother in law who precipitated Blanche’s tragedy. Produced across the world, translated into many languages, and recreated as a prize winning film, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ has attracted one of the widest audiences in contemporary literature.

Collected Stories

Tennessee Williams was famous for insisting he write every morning. Even during his darkest days, while mourning a lover, or abusing some substance and he abused most of them at one time or another he’d write. The stories in this volume, arranged chronologically, are from every period of his long life, and recreate the milieux Williams knew and chronicled so movingly from his gypsy youth in St. Louis and New Orleans to his days of celebrity in Hollywood and New York. Some are studies for his plays, and like them, their language can suddenly surprise you with a poetic image that shines like a jewel. This edition includes a useful publishing history for each of the fifty stories.’One overpowering impression emerges from all these stories put together: Tennessee Williams knew more about the hidden life of far flung America than any of us really suspected.’ Seymour Krim, Washington Post Book World’By turns disturbing, moving, and funny; these stories help amplify Williams’s tragic vision, for like the plays, they underline his preoccupation and insight into the conflicts of the human heart.’ Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The Collected Poems

The definitive edition of all of the playwright/poet’s poetry. Tennessee Williams, acknowledged lyric master of American drama, first came to the attention of New Directions founder James Laughlin as a young poet who subsequently appeared in an early anthology, Five Young American Poets, 1944. Over the years, Williams was cajoled into publishing two volumes of his poetry, In the Winter of Cities 1956, expanded in a 1964 paper edition and Androgyne, Mon Amour 1977. Now, as his letters, his journals, and his previously unpublished plays are appearing to further our understanding of this complex artist whose piercing honesty and compassion for life’s misfits and the dispossessed have won audiences all over the world, it is time to look to the full body of his poetry for insight into the private heart of the man not his characters and for appreciation of his unique and very American poetic voice. In this definitive edition of The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, all of the playwright/poet’s previously collected and uncollected published poems, including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and selected variants. The collection is the work of textual scholar David Roessel co editor, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf 1994, and Williams specialist Nicholas Moschovakis, undertaken in conjunction with the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, who inherited the copyrights to all of Williams’s work.

Tales of Desire

‘I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny.’ John Waters I cannot write any sort of story, said Tennessee to Gore Vidal unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire. These transgressive Tales of Desire, including One Arm, Desire and the Black Masseur, Hard Candy, and The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen, show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best.

Candles to the Sun

The first full length play by novice playwright Thomas Lanier Williams to be produced, Candles to the Sun was premiered by The Mummers, a semi professional and socially aware theatre troupe in St. Louis on March 18, 1937, and received rave reviews in the local press. Set in the Red Hills coal mining section of Alabama and dealing with both the attempts of the miners to unionize and the bleak lives of their families, the play, according to St. Louis Star Times critic Reed Hynds, is ‘an earnest and searching examination of a particular social reality set out in human and dramatic terms.’ Working principally from a script supplied by Jane Garrett Carter who played Star in the original production, Dan Isaac, as he did in his edition of another ‘early’ Williams’ play, Spring Storm, uses his directorial and scholarly skills to prepare a version as close as possible to the 1937 production while providing contemporary readers or actors with the necessary social, political and theatrical context to make the play accessible and relevant once more.

The Magic Tower

A wonderful collection of never before collected one acts: The peak of my virtuosity was in the one act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers in a rope Tennessee Williams. Here are portraits of American life during the Great Depression and after, populated by a hopelessly hopeful chorus girl, a munitions manufacturer ensnared in a love triangle, a rural family that deals justice on its children, an overconfident mob dandy, a poor couple who quarrel to vanquish despair, a young spinster enthralled by the impulse of rebellion, and, in The Magic Tower, a passionate artist and his wife whose youth and optimism are not enough to protect their dream marriage. This new volume gathers some of Williams’s most exuberant early work and includes one acts that he would later expand to powerful full length dramas: The Pretty Trap, a cheerful take on The Glass Menagerie, and Interior: Panic, a stunning precursor to A Streetcar Named Desire. The plays include: At Liberty The Magic Tower Me, Vashya Curtains for the Gentleman In Our Profession Every Twenty Minutes Honor the Living The Case of the Crushed Petunias Moony s Kid Don t Cry The Dark Room The Pretty Trap Interior: Panic Kingdom of Earth I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays Some Problems for The Moose Lodge

Fugitive Kind

Fugitive Kind, one of Tennessee Williams’s earliest plays, is one of his richest in dramatic material. Written in 1937 when the playwright was still Thomas Lanier Williams, Fugitive Kind introduces the character who will inhabit most of his later plays: the marginal man or woman who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive. Signature Tennessee Williams’ characters, situations, and even the title which was used as The Fugitive Kind for the 1960 film based on Orpheus Descending have their genesis here. At age twenty six, Williams was still learning his craft and this, his second full length play, shows his debt to sources as diverse as thirties gangster films The Petrified Forest, Winterset and Romeo and Juliet. Fugitive Kind, with its star crossed lovers and big city slum setting, takes place in a flophouse on the St. Louis waterfront in the shadow of Eads Bridge, where Williams spent Saturdays away from his shoe factory job and met his characters: jobless wayfarers on the dole, young writers and artists of the WPA, even gangsters and G men. Fugitive Kind was also Williams’s second play to be produced by The Mummers, a St. Louis theatre group devoted to drama of social protest. Called ‘vital and absorbing’ by a contemporary review in The St. Louis Star Times, this play reveals the young playwright’s own struggle between his radical socialist sympathies and his poetic inclinations, and signals his future reputation as our most compassionate lyric dramatist.

Spring Storm

‘A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams’s work.’ World Literature TodayWhen Tennessee Williams read Spring Storm aloud to his playwriting class at the University of Iowa in 1938, he was met with silence and embarrassment. His professor, the renowned E. C. Mabie, remarked as he got up and dismissed the seminar, ‘Well, we all have to paint our nudes!’ Tom’s earlier comment in his journal that the play ‘is well constructed, no social propaganda, and is suitable for the commercial stage’ seems accurate enough in 1999, but woefully naive deep in the Depression when the play’s sexual explicitness particularly its matter of fact acceptance of a woman’s right to her own sexuality would have been seen as not only shocking but also politically radical. Spring Storm would later be disavowed by the author as ‘simply a study of Sex a blind animal urge or force like the regenerative force of April gripping four lives and leading them into a tangle of cruel and ugly relations.’ But the solid and deft characterizations of the four young people whose lives intertwine the sexually alive Heavenly Critchfield, her earthy lover Dick Miles, Heavenly’s wealthy but tongue tied admirer Arthur Shannon, and the repressed librarian Hertha Nielson who loves Arthur are archetypes of characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. Epic in scope, a bit melodramatic in execution, tragic in outcome, Spring Storm created a wave of excitement among theatre insiders when it was given a staged reading at The Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Octoberfest ’96. This edition has been prepared, with an illuminating introduction, by Dan Isaac, who initiated the Octoberfest production.

The Glass Menagerie

A beautiful clothbound edition of a beloved classic to celebrate the 100th birthday of America’s greatest playwright, with a sweeping new introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner. The Glass Menagerie marked a crucial turning point in American theater, and forever changed the life of its then unknown author. Williams s elegiac master piece brought a radical new lyricism to Broadway the tragedy, fragility, and tenderness of this memory play have made it one of America s most powerful, timeless, and compelling plays. The introduction by Tony Kushner sparkles with the kind of rich, unique insight that only a fellow playwright could convey. The Deluxe Centennial Edition includes: Tony Kushner s astonishing introduction. The pioneering essay, The Homosexual in Society, by Tennessee s friend Robert Duncan, and poems by Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Walt Whitman, and Tennessee Williams, which Kushner discusses as sources of inspiration. The Pretty Trap, a cheerful one act run up to The Glass Menagerie. The Portrait of a Girl in Glass, Tennessee s short story variation of the play Photographs of great actresses who have played Amanda, and stills from various stage and film incarnations of The Glass Menagerie. Williams s classic essay about fame, The Catastrophe of Success. The playwright s original Production Notes. The 1944 opening night rave reviews from Chicago. An essay by the distinguished Williams scholar Allean Hale, Inside The Menagerie, provides autobiographical particulars about Williams s family life in St. Louis. A gorgeous new jacket design by Rodrigo Corral.

A Streetcar Named Desire

This work includes in depth discussions of Tennessee Williams’ great drama. A Streetcar Named Desire quickly became an international sensation when it premiered on ‘Broadway’ in 1947. The play ran an impressive 855 performances and won a Pulitzer Prize before theatres in cities as far flung as Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, and Melbourne began staging their own productions. When the play was adapted to film four years after its premiere, its reputation as one of the most compelling American dramas of the twentieth century was cemented. Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski became iconic characters, and Marlon Brando, a largely unknown actor before ‘Streetcar’, was rocketed to stardom by his compelling performance. This volume in the ‘Critical Insights’ series, edited and with an introduction by Brenda Murphy, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, brings together a variety of new and classic essays on Williams’ famous play. Murphy’s introduction sets the stage for critical investigations of the play in its description of the delicate negotiations that played out between Williams and Elia Kazan, the play’s and film’s director, as the two finalized the stage script and, later, the screenplay. A brief biography of Williams and a new essay by ‘Paris Review’ contributor Catherine Steindler discussing Williams’ penchant for extreme, nearly mad characters provide further introductory material to Williams’ achievement. For readers new to Williams’ play, a quartet of original essays provide valuable context. Camille Yvette Welsch examines the play in light of post war American culture and censorship and Kenneth Elliott compares Williams’ treatment of tragedy with Arthur Miller’s in his equally iconic play of the same period, ‘Death of a Salesman’. Neil Heims, in turn, considers how repression drives the play’s action, while Janyce Marson reviews a selection of ‘Streetcar’ criticism. Nine previously published essays are also collected here to deepen readers’ understanding of the play and its critics. Verna Foster and Britton J. Harwood examine Williams’ unique adaptation of the tragedy and tragicomedy to suit the strictures of modern drama and the tastes of contemporary audiences. John S. Bak, Dan Isaac and Anne Fleche offer interpretations of Blanche’s rape, while Dean Shackelford discusses the homosexual subtexts of Williams’ works. Finally, Linda Costanzo Cahir, Keith Dorwick, and Nancy M. Tischler all examine various ‘Streetcar’ adaptations, from the 1951 film to the 1995 opera. Rounding out the volume are a chronology of Williams’ life as well as a complete list of Williams’ dramatic, poetic, fiction, and nonfiction works and a lengthy bibliography of critical works for readers desiring to study Williams in greater depth.

Summer and Smoke

‘Period of adjustement’ is about marital problems that surface at Christmas, in a comedy of human foibles and frustrations; ‘Summer and Smoke‘ is a turn of the century drama set in Mississippi. ‘Small Craft Warnings’ is set in a bar on the Californian coast, where a group of people grapple with existence and survival.

Camino Real

The acclaimed classic in a new edition, now with a new introduction, the author’s original foreword and afterword, the one act play 10 Blocks on the Camino Real, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Michael Paller. In this phantasmagorical play, the Camino Real pronounciation: C mino R al is a long highway, a dead end, a police state in a vaguely Latin American country, a nightmare, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature Don Quixote, Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron inhabit a place where corruption, starvation, indifference and greed have immobilized anyone who tries to escape. Then, into this netherworld, the archetypal Kilroy arrives a sailor and all American guy with ‘a heart as big as the head of baby.’ Like others before him in the Camino Real, Kilroy is robbed, conned, turned into a patsy, and he very nearly breaks…
but not quite. When this experimental epic opened on Broadway in 1953, it confounded the critics, but not the audiences. The play’s iconic/ironic humor, playful conceits, and towering concerns about society’s demand for conformity, the courage of the artist, and the power of compassion have made it a classic.

The Rose Tattoo

Published as a trade paperback for the first time, with a new introduction by the acclaimed playwright John Patrick Shanley Doubt and the one-act on which The Rose Tattoo was based. The Rose Tattoo is larger than life-a fable, a Greek tragedy, a comedy, a melodrama-it is a love letter from Tennessee Williams to anyone who has ever been in love or ever will be. Professional widow and dressmaker Serafina delle Rosa has withdrawn from the world, locking away her heart and her sixteen-year-old daughter Rosa. Then one day a man with the sexy body of her late Sicilian husband and the face of a village idiot, Mangiacavallo Italian for ‘eat a horse’, stumbles into her life and clumsily unlocks Serafina’s fiery anger, sense of betrayal, pride, wit, passion, and eventually her capacious love.

The original production of The Rose Tattoo won Tony Awards for best play and for the stars, Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton. Anna Magnani received the Academy Award as Best Actress for the 1955 film version.

This edition of The Rose Tattoo has an Introduction by playwright John Patrick Shanley, the author’s original foreword, the one-act The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View that was the germ for the play, and an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Jack Barbera.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The definitive text of this American classic reissued with an introduction by Edward Albee Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance and Williams’ essay ‘Person to Person.’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father’s inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat. The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year. Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many years the present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003 04 season. This definitive edition also includes Williams’ essay ‘Person to Person,’ Williams’ notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author’s life. One of America’s greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright’s perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now.

Orpheus Descending

A play in three acts by Tennessee Williams.

Sweet Bird of Youth

The acclaimed classic in a new edition, now with an insightful new introduction, the author’s original foreword, and the one act play, The Enemy: Time, on which Sweet Bird of Youth was based. Sometime actor and full time male hustler Chance Wayne returns to the Gulf Coast town of St. Cloud in an attempt to retrieve his lost innocence by reuniting with his high school girlfriend, Heavenly Finley. But Chance arrives there with his current employer, the drug addicted, over the hill movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, who uses Chance, teaches him to use others, and doesn’t intend to let him go. Chance learns that when he left St. Cloud years before, he left Heavenly with a crippling venereal disease. Heavenly’s brother and her father the powerful Boss Finley, a politician who has been responsible for local lynchings have marked Chance as ‘a criminal degenerate’ and plan to castrate him. Williams knew how to tell a good tale, and this gritty and wrenching play also reveals the dark side of the American dreams of youth and fame by implicating small town injustice, systemic racism, and the depth of suffering that results from personal and public corruption.

The Night of the Iguana

Now published for the first time as a trade paperback with a new introduction and the short story on which it was based. Williams wrote: This is a play about love in its purest terms. It is also Williams’s robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women s college, the self described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety seven year old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin the world s oldest living and practicing poet , a family of grotesque Na*zi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night. This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by award winning playwright Doug Wright, the author s original Foreword, the short story The Night of the Iguana which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch. I m tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent yeah, that s what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this this this angry, petulant old man. The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana

Period of Adjustment

‘Period of adjustement’ is about marital problems that surface at Christmas, in a comedy of human foibles and frustrations; ‘Summer and Smoke’ is a turn of the century drama set in Mississippi. ‘Small Craft Warnings’ is set in a bar on the Californian coast, where a group of people grapple with existence and survival.

The Two-Character Play

A classic play by Tennessee Williams in a definitive, author approved edition. Reality and fantasy are interwoven with terrifying power as two actors on tour brother and sister find themselves deserted by the trope in a decrepit ‘state theatre in an unknown state.’ Faced perhaps by an audience expecting a performance, they enact ‘The Two Character Play’ an illusions within an illusion, and ‘out cry’ from isolation, panic and fear. ‘I think it is my most beautiful play since Streetcar,’ Tennessee Williams said, ‘and I’ve never stopped working on it…
. It is a cri de coeur, but then all creative work,all life, in a sense is a cri de coeur.’ In the course of its evolution, several earlier versions of The Two Character Play have been produced. The first of them was presented in 1967 in London and Chicago and brought out in 1969 by New Directions in a signed limited edition. The next, staged in 1973 in New York under the title Out Cry, was published by New Directions in 1973 The third version New York, 1975, again titled The Two Character Play, is the one Tennessee Williams wished to include in New Directions’ The Theatre of Tennessee Williams series. It is this version which is presented in this ND paperback.

Vieux Carré

Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carr is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but emotion re created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright’s own 1938 39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes it form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams’s surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants or his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carr : the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought up young woman from New York making at last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, and education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that ‘writers are shameless spies,’ who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget. Building on two decades of Williams scholarship since Vieux Carr was originally published, Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, has provided a new introduction for this edition, giving the most authoritative account yet of its background and genesis.

Not About Nightingales

Not About Nightingales, never before produced or published, is an early play by the 27 year old Tom Williams and the first play to carry his signature pen name ‘Tennessee’. It was rescued from Williams’ archive by the actress Vanessa Redgrave Written in 1938 and based on an actual newspaper story, the play follows the events of a prison scandal which shocked America when convicts leading a hunger strike were locked in a steam heated cell and roasted to death. Williams later said: ‘I have never written anything since that could compete with its violence and horror.’

Stairs to the Roof

A play produced only twice in the 1940s and now published for the first time reveals that Tennessee Williams anticipated the themes of Star Trek by decades. Sixty years ago a young Tennessee Williams wrote a play looking toward the year 2001. Stairs to the Roof is a rare and different Williams’ work: a love story, a comedy, an experiment in meta theatre, with a touch of early science fiction. Tennessee Williams called Stairs to the Roof ‘a prayer for the wild of heart who are kept in cages’ and dedicated it to ‘all the little wage earners of the world.’ It reflects the would be poet’s ‘season in hell’ during the Depression when he had to quit college to type orders eight hours a day at the International Shoe Factory in St. Louis. Stairs is Williams’ revenge, expressed through his alter ego, Benjamin Murphy, the clerk who stages a one man rebellion against the clock, the monotony of his eight to five job, and all the dehumanizing forces of an increasingly mechanized and commercial society. Ben’s swift moving series of fantastic adventures culminate in an escape from the ordinary that is an endorseme*nt of the American dream. In 1941 with the world at war and civilization in danger of collapse, Williams dared to imagine a utopian future as Ben leads us up his stairs towards the Millennium. Stairs to the Roof was produced only twice, once at the Playbox in Pasadena, California, in 1945, and subsequently at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1947. Now, in an edition meticulously prepared by noted Williams scholar Allean Hale, Williams fans can share this play of youthful optimism.

Memoirs

For the ‘old crocodile,’ as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves this story. When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media though long self identified as a gay man, Williams’ candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America’s greatest living playwright were called ‘a raw display of private life’ by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, thirty years later, Williams’ look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a ‘starving artist,’ the ‘overnight’ success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays. And, of course, Memoirs is filled with Williams’ amazing friends from the worlds of stage, screen, and literature as he often hilariously, sometimes fondly, sometimes not remembers them: Laurette Taylor, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Vivian Leigh, Carson McCullers, Anna Magnani, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, and Tallulah Bankhead to name a few. And now film director John Waters, well acquainted with shocking the American public, has written an introduction that gives some perspective on the various reactions to Tennessee’s Memoirs, while also paying tribute to a fellow artist who inspired many with his integrity and endurance.

Tennessee Williams’ Letters To Donald Windham, 1940 1965

Donald Windham’s friendship with Tennessee Williams began in 1940 when Windham was 19 and had just arrived in New York from Atlanta. Charting the highs and lows of their friendship, this work contains a collection of the correspondences of Windham and Williams, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright.

The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: 1920-1945

Tennessee Williams wrote letters to his family, friends, and theatrical contacts as he wrote his plays; with an eye for precise detail;, self deprecating humor, and lyric grace. Tennessee Williams’s innovative approach and natural lyricism transformed American drama after World War II. Both major and minor works continue to be performed worldwide at the same time that his earliest and previously unproduced plays make audiences remember what theatrical excitement is all about. Now, the first volume of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams takes the author from boyhood through high school, college, and tentative productions of fledgling work to screenwriting at MGM, culminating in his first major success with the autobiographical The Glass Menagerie in 1945. The letters detail, in the playwright’s own words, the painful intensity of his early life as the Williams’ family drama creates a template for the plays to come. Presented with a running commentary to separate Williams’s sometimes hilarious but often devious counter reality from truth, The Selected Letters, Volume I: 1920 1945 which includes 330 letters out of nearly 2300 collected has been meticulously edited by two of this country’s premier Williams scholars. Albert J. Devlin, professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita if Pennsylvania State University, author of the first critical study of Williams’s work, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan. Work on this project is being supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945 1983 is scheduled for publication in 2002. With b/w photographs.

Notebooks

Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, here published for the first time, presents by turns a passionate, whimsical, movingly lyrical, self reflective, and completely uninhibited record of the life of this monumental American genius from 1936 to 1981, the year of his death. In these pages Williams 1911 1981 wrote out his most private thoughts as well as sketches of plays, poems, and accounts of his social, professional, and sexual encounters. The Notebooks are the repository of Williams s fears, obsessions, passions, and contradictions, and they form possibly the most spontaneous self portrait by any writer in American history. Meticulously edited and annotated by Margaret Thornton, the Notebooks follow Williams growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments. At one point, Williams writes, I feel dull and disinterested in the literary line. Dr. Heller bores me with all his erudite discussion of literature. Writing is just writing! Why all the fuss about it? This remarkable record of the life of Tennessee Williams is about writing how his writing came up like a pure, underground stream through the often unhappy chaos of his life to become a memorable and permanent contribution to world literature.

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