Most Popular Books by Tennessee Williams

One of Tennessee Williams'' most popular plays in a special annotated edition for school and college students. The Glass Menagerie,Tennessee Williams'' first great popular success and an autobiographicalplay about his mother and sister, launched the brilliant andcontroversial career of this ground-breaking American playwright. Setin St Louis during the depression era of the 1930s, it is the poignantdrama of a family''s gradual disintegration, under pressure both fromoutside and within. A frustrated mother persuades her rebelliousson to provide a ''gentleman caller'' for her shy, crippled daughter, buther romantic dreams are shattered by the intervention of harsh reality.This edition provides the author''s preferred text, available for thefirst time in the United Kingdom, and includes Williams'' essay on theimpact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, ''The Catastrophe ofSuccess'', as well as a short section of Williams'' own production notes.

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.

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.

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.

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

When Tennessee Williams died in the winter of 1983 he left among his voluminous papers the texts of four screenplays none of which had been made into or was even being considered for a film at that time.

Sweet Bird of Youth is Tennessee William''s atmospheric play of 1959 about Chance Wayne, the one-time heart-throb of his hometown who returns hoping to break into the movies and find the girl he loved in his youth. Accompanied by faded movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, grieving in a haze of drugs and alcohol for her lost youth, he discovers that time is shortly to catch-up with him and wreak a terrible retribution for his past actions. In its exploration of corruption, ageing and the effects of time, the play offers a magnificent study of the dark side of the American dreams of youth and fame. This Student Edition provides an extensive introduction and notes by Katherine Weiss. The introduction includes a chronology of Williams'' life and times, a summary of the plot, commentary on the characters, themes, language and context, and a production history of the play. Together with questions for further study and notes on words and phrases from the text, this is the essential edition of the play for students of literature and drama.

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.