New Releases by Tennessee Williams

"A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams''s work."—World Literature Today When 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.

Two of Tennessee Williams''s most revered dramas in a single paperback edition for the first time. Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, “lewd vagrant” Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot. Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a “short morality play,” has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion. With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman — he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer — this volume also offers Williams’s related essay, “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,” and a chronology of the playwright’s life and works.

Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams''s Vieux Carré 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 Carré: 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 Carré 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.

This definitive collection establishes Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams’ Collected Stories combines the four short-story volumes published during Williams’ lifetime with previously unpublished or uncollected stories. Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."

Loneliness, sexual tension and the need for human kindness pervade these three plays by Tennessee Williams, as their characters rage against personal demons and the modern world. In ''Sweet Bird of Youth'', a drifter, Chance Wayne, returns to his home town with an ageing movie actress in search of the girl he loved in his youth, but with terrible, violent results. ''Period of Adjustment'' tells the story of two young newlyweds who visit the husband''s old army friend on Christmas Eve after unsuccessfully consummating their marriage, and unleash forbidden passion, while in ''The Night of the Iguana'' a diverse group of people, including a disturbed ex-minister and a troubled spinster, are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel for one eventful night.

"Summer and Smoke" is a two-part, thirteen-scene play by Tennessee Williams, originally titled Chart of Anatomy when Williams began work on it in 1945. In 1964, Williams revised the play as "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.""Summer and Smoke" is set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi from the "turn of the century through 1916," and centers on a high-strung, unmarried minister''s daughter, Alma Winemiller, and the spiritual/sexual romance that nearly blossoms between her and the wild, undisciplined young doctor who grew up next door, John Buchanan, Jr. She, ineffably refined, identifies with the gothic cathedral, "reaching up to something beyond attainment"; her name, as Williams makes clear during the play, means "soul" in Spanish; whereas Buchanan, doctor and sensualist, defies her with the soulless anatomy chart. By play''s end, however, Buchanan and Alma have traded places philosophically.Fuji Books'' edition of "Summer And Smoke" contains supplementary texts:* "I Rise In Flame, Cried The Phoenix", a one-act play by Tennessee Williams which presents a fictionalized version of the death of English writer D. H. Lawrence on the French Riveria; Lawrence was one of Williams'' chief literary influences.* An excerpt from "The Glass Menagerie", by Tennessee Williams.* A few selected quotes of Tennessee Williams.

This new volume gathers some of Williams'' most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas, including "The Pretty Trap," a cheerful take on "The Glass Menagerie," and "Interior: Panic," a stunning precursor to "A Streetcar Named Desire."

"There isn''t a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."--Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post

The spellbinding last full-length play produced during the author''s lifetime is now published for the first time.

"Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams'' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival"--Back cover.

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.

Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams''s notebooks follow his 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.

A collection of poetic works by the eminent playwright features substantial piece variants, poems from his plays, and accompanying explanatory notes, in a volume that is complemented by a CD recording of the author''s reading of his "Blue Mountain Ballads" and other works.

Social outcasts, misfit survivors, dangerous passions--Tennessee Williams fleshed out the characters and themes that would dominate his later work in Fugitive Kind, one of his earliest plays.

Back cover: As mirrors of his emotional and imaginative life, the plays of Tennessee Williams explore the darker side of human nature and are haunted by the pervasive theme of loneliness that is humanity''s inescapable destiny. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, one of his masterpieces, seethes with the family tensions, suppressed sexuality and the less-than-secret whisper of scandal that lie beneath the civilized veneer of the American South. The Milk Train Doesn''t Stop Here Anymore is a passionate examination of a woman''s life as she recounts her memoirs in the face of death. In The Night Of The Iguana a group of diverse people are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel, all imprisoned in their own way.

Profiles the works of Tennessee Williams and provides information on his life and writing career.

Winner of the Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters, Modern Language Association, 2001. When first published in 2000, Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams was hailed as "indispensable" (Choice), "a carefully researched, fully documented study," (Buffalo News) and "a model edition of a significant set of letters by one of America''s leading writers" (MLA citation for the Morton N. Cohen Award). This volume will help a widening circle of the great American playwright''s readers appreciate that he was also "a prodigy of the letter" (Allan Jalon, San Francisco Chronicle) and that "his letters are among the century''s finest" (John Lahr, The New Yorker). Tennessee Williams wrote to family, friends, and fellow artists with equal measures of piety, wit, and astute self-knowledge. Presented with a running commentary to separate Williams''s often hilarious, but sometimes devious, counter-reality from truth, the letters form a virtual autobiography of the great American dramatist. Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: 1920-1945 includes 330 letters written to nearly seventy correspondents and chosen from a group of 900 letters collected by two leading Williams scholars: Albert J. Devlin, professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams ends with the unexpected triumph of The Glass Menagerie. Volume II extends the correspondence from 1946 to 1957, a time of intense creativity which saw the production of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Following the immense success of Streetcar, Williams struggles to retain his prominence with a prodigious outpouring of stories, poetry, and novels as well as plays. Several major film projects, including the notorious Baby Doll, bring Williams and his collaborator Elia Kazan into conflict with powerful agencies of censorship, exposing both the conservative landscape of the 1950s and Williams'' own studied resistance to the forces of conformity. Letters written to Kazan, Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, publisher James Laughlin, and Audrey Wood, Williams'' resourceful agent, continue earlier lines of correspondence and introduce new celebrity figures. The Broadway and Hollywood successes in the evolving career of America''s premier dramatist vie with a string of personal losses and a deepening depression to make this period an emotional and artistic rollercoaster for Tennessee. Compiled by leading Williams scholars Albert J. Devlin, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at the Pennsylvania State University, Volume II maintains the exacting standard of Volume I, called by Choice: "a volume that will prove indispensable to all serious students of this author...meticulous annotations greatly increase the value of this gathering."

Offers Williams'' adaptation of a late nineteenth-century drama about an actress'' rejection of the advances of a melancholy, lovesick young man.

The playwright dramatizes his experiences in Cape Cod during the pivotal summer of 1940, when he met his first great love and openly acknowledged his homosexuality.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams.

A collection of letters from Williams to his most trusted friend reveal his feelings, opinions, and details of his everyday life.

This book is William''s symbol for the military-industrial complex and all the dehumanizing trends it represents from mindless cocktail party chatter to bribery of officials to assassination plots directed against those who won''t play the game, to attempted coups by right-wing zealots.

Length: 4 scenes.

The interviews selected for this volume encompass five decades of an intense literary life and range from the standard and well-known to the more obscure and specialized. The interviews are filled with revealing insights into Williams'' works and career. Most of them employ the essay-interview format. The three dozen or so interviews in this volume have been chosen, in part, to retrace the progress of Williams'' long career by marking important dramatic productions and documenting telling moments in his personal and artistic life. ISBN 0-87805-263-1 (pbk.): $14.95.

For use in schools and libraries only. Maggie the Cat fights for the lives of her damaged and drinking husband Brick, herself, and their unborn children in the revised version of the dramatization of Big Daddy''s birthday and deathday party and family gathering.