Most Popular Books by Tennessee Williams

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

For use in schools and libraries only. Tennessee Williams'' classic drama studies the emotional disintegration of a Southern woman whose last chance for happiness is destroyed by her vindictive brother-in-law.

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

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.

Serafina delle Rose is a widow whose intense and absorbing instinct for love drives everything before it. Her story, and that of the lover she chooses and the daughter she denies, are forged into a play of power, humanity and soaring emotion in this Tony-winning Tennessee Williams classic.

Theatre of Tennessee Williams Vol. 2. The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real.

Three people - a tubercular man, his foolish new wife, and his virile half-brother - are caught in an isolated farmhouse in the path of a Mississippi flood.

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.

A taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner. In 1956, Time magazine called Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge, who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner in Tiger Tail County, Mississippi until she is "ready," has gained in humor and pathos over the years as society has caught up with the author’s savagely honest view of bigotry and lust in the rural South. But Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a writer for the stage, and this reissue of his original screenplay for the Elia Kazan movie of Baby Doll is now accompanied by the script of the full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, developed from that screenplay during the ’70s. The text, which incorporates the author’s final revisions, records the play as it was produced at the Hippodrome Theatre Workshop in Gainesville, Florida, in 1979.

''He is, quite simply, indispensable'' Peter Shaffer 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. Sweet Bird of Youth/Period of Adjustment/The Night of the Iguana

These three dramatic works by Tennessee Williams explore the darker side of human nature and are haunted by a sense of isolation and regret. ''Suddenly Last Summer'' is the starkly told story of Catherine, who seemingly goes insane after her cousin Sebastian dies in grisly circumstances on a trip to Europe. ''The Milk Train Doesn''t Stop Here Anymore'' is a passionate examination of a wealthy old woman as she recounts her memories in the face of death, while in ''Small Craft Warnings'' a motley group of people - including a blowsy beautician, a discredited alcoholic doctor, a vulnerable waif and two gay men - sit around a seedy bar on the Californian coast, each contemplating their own desperate fate.