Most Popular Books by Tennessee Williams

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Williams’ Collected Stories combines the four short-story volumes published during Williams’ lifetime with previously unpublished or uncollected stories.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."

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.

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.

THE STORY: The scene is a beach shack on Cape Cod, during the summer of 1940, where August, a fledgling playwright, is rewriting the play intended for his Broadway debut. He is distracted by his infatuation for Kip, a handsome Canadian dancer and d

From the author of the Books Like · A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams · The Glass Menagerie · Cat on a Hot Tin Roof · Suddenly Last Summer · The Night of the Iguana · A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays · Summer and Smoke · Sweet Bird of Youth · The Rose Tattoo · Orpheus Descending ♥♥ A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams♥♥ Glimpse of the Book: The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L&N traces and the river. The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables. This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both. It is first dark, of an evening early in May. The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee. A corresponding air is evoked by the music of Negro entertainers at a barroom around the corner. In this part of New Orleans you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers. This “blue piano” expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here……. ♥♥ A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams♥♥ About the Author: Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father''s birth. Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O''Neill''s Long Day''s Journey into Night and Arthur Miller''s Death of a Salesman. Much of Williams'' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. ♥♥ A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams♥♥ Summary of the Book: Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire takes place in a vibrant, lower-class neighborhood in New Orleans. Blanche DuBois, an aging southern belle from a plantation in Laurel, Alabama, arrives to visit her pregnant sister, Stella. Upon meeting her sister, Blanche claims that she has lost the mansion in which she and her sister grew up, and she has been making ends meet as a schoolteacher. She also claims that she is visiting to calm her nerves. Stella’s husband, Stanley, is suspicious of Blanche, and as a result of Blanche’s genteel behavior, Stanley believes that she thinks of herself as above them. He hates her flirtatious and pretentious manner, and he insists that she share any money from the proceeds of the mansion with Stella and himself, but Blanche shows him that she lost the house to the bank and that she is nearly broke. One evening, Stella and Blanche return from a night out while Stanley and his friends are playing poker. One of Stanley’s friends, Mitch, finds himself sexually and emotionally attracted to Blanche and attempts several times to speak with her. He tells her about how he is taking care of his sick mother, and they share a cigarette. When Blanche turns on a radio and begins dancing with Mitch, Stanley becomes enraged at the interruptions to the poker game and Blanche’s flirtatious attitude, and he throws the radio out the window. Stella, seeing Stanley’s drunken and inappropriate reaction, insists that they end the poker game, but Stanley takes her offstage and beats her. Stella forgives him while Blanche shares a cigarette with Mitch and their interest in one another grows. The next day, Blanche tries to convince Stella to leave Stanley, but Stella claims that Blanche is overreacting. As Blanche begins explaining how vulgar and brutish Stanley is, he walks into the next room and overhears Blanche denigrating him. After she is finished, Stanley pretends not to have heard them talking, but when Stella runs to his arms to hug him, he stares at Blanche challengingly. After this interaction, Blanche begins writing a letter to a former boyfriend, Shep Huntleigh, who has made millions in the oil business. She believes he will help them escape, but Stella refuses and Blanche stops writing the letter. Stanley comes back home and mentions that he spoke to his auto-parts supplier, Shaw, who regularly travels through Laurel. Shaw has told him that Blanche used to stay in the ill-reputed Flamingo Hotel. Banche is shaken by this but denies it. Blanche plans to go on a date with Mitch, and she reveals to Stella that she feels insecure about her age and hopes that Mitch will not judge her because she does not plan to have sex with him. Stella and Stanley go on a date while Blanche is waiting for Mitch to arrive. As she is waiting alone, a young boy comes collecting money for the local paper. Blanche does not have any money, but she flirts with him and kisses him on the mouth before sending him away. Mitch arrives with a bouquet of flowers, and they go on their date. After several more dates, Mitch is concerned that he has not been entertaining to Blanche, but her mind is elsewhere. She has been thinking about her late husband, who killed himself after Blanche discovered him having sex with another man. Mitch tells Blanche that his mother is dying, and they decide that they are meant to be together because they both understand loneliness. After this date ends, it is Blanche’s birthday, and Stella is setting up decorations while Blanche bathes. Stanley comes home from the auto shop and tells Stella that he has learned about Blanche’s past: she had a reputation for being a loose woman in Laurel, and she was fired for having an affair with one of her students. He has informed Mitch and also purchased Blanche a birthday present: a one-way bus ticket back to Laurel. During the birthday party, conversation around the table is awkward, and Mitch does not arrive. When Stella criticizes Stanley’s eating habits, he throws his plates to the floor and leaves. When he comes back, he gives Stella the bus ticket back to laurel, and she becomes sick, running to the bathroom gagging. Stella is angry with Stanley for his insensitive treatment of Blanche. Stella begins to go into labor, and Stanley takes her to the hospital. Later that night, Blanche is drunk, and Mitch arrives to break up with her. She admits to the fact that she was promiscuous in Laurel and was fired from her teaching job for seducing one of her students. Mitch, though disgusted that she has lied to him, attempts to have sex with her. She screams “fire” as a way to draw attention to the flat, and Mitch runs out the door. Stanley comes back from the hospital, saying that Stella will be at the hospital until morning. He is in high spirits because of his son’s birth. Blanche, drunk, tells him that she will be leaving soon because Shep, her former suitor, has agreed to go travelling with her. She also tells him that she has broken up with Mitch. Stanley knows that she is lying about Shep, and he knows that Mitch broke up with her. In light of these lies, he begins insulting Blanche for her holier-than-thou attitude and makes fun of her appearance. He advances toward her, and when Blanche attempts to defend herself with a broken bottle, he grabs her arms and rapes her. In the final scene of the play, Blanche is preparing to leave, having convinced herself that Shep is going to come to take her away. In reality, she is to be sent to a psychiatric institution. Stella admits that Blanche told her about the rape, but Stella refuses to believe her sister, thinking it an imagined story brought on by her sister’s insanity. When the doctor and nurse come to take Blanche away, she initially resists but eventually accepts defeat. Though Stella has doubts about her sister’s fate and begins crying, she holds her newborn child as Stanley comforts her. ♥♥ A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams♥♥

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

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.

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. 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.

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.

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."

The spellbinding last full-length play produced during the author''s lifetime is now published for the first time. Christmas 1982: Cornelius and Bella McCorkle of Pascagoula, Mississippi, return home one midnight in a thunderstorm from the Memphis funeral of their older son to a house and a life literally falling apart--daughter Joanie is in an insane asylum and their younger son Charlie is upstairs having sex with his pregnant, holy-roller girlfriend as the McCorkles enter. Cornelius, who has political ambitions and a litany of health problems, is trying to find a large amount of moonshine money his gentle wife Bella has hidden somewhere in their collapsing house, but his noisy efforts are disrupted by a stream of remarkable characters, both living and dead. While Williams often used drama to convey hope and desperation in human hearts, it was through this dark, expressionistic comedy, which he called a "Southern gothic spook sonata," that he was best able to chronicle his vision of the fragile state of our world.

An alternate version of an experimental, partially autobiographical play by Tennessee Williams. The characters, Felice and Clare, are two actors on tour, as well as brother and sister. Left behind by the rest of the company, they try to present a show, making up what has been forgotten or not yet written.

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.

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.

The very title of Sweet Bird of Youth is one of ironic pity. The two chief characters--a raddled has-been actress from Hollywood, seeking to forget her present in drugs and sex, and her still handsome masseur-gigolo, who has brought her to his hometown in the South, believing that through her money and faded glamor his gaudy illusions may yet come true--are the reverse side of the American dream of youth. Yet as they work out their fate amid violence and horror, there is nevertheless a note of compassion for the damned.

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 is a dead end, a police state in a vaguely Latin American country, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature—Don Quixote, Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron—inhabit a place where corruption and indifference have immobilized and nearly destroyed the human spirit. Then, into this netherworld, the archetypal Kilroy arrives—a sailor and all-American guy with “a heart as big as the head of baby.” Celebrated American playwright John Guare has written an illuminative Introduction for this edition. Also included are Williams’ original Foreword and Afterword to the play, the one-act play Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Michael Paller.

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.

This early full-length play put a young Tennessee Williams'' passion for social justice in the spotlight. "Haunting, searing, unforgettable" —London Herald In early 1998, sixty years after it was written, one of Tennessee Williams'' first full-length plays, Not About Nightingales, was premiered by Britain''s Royal National Theatre and was immediately hailed as "one of the most remarkable theatrical discoveries of the last quarter century (London Evening Standard). Brought to the attention of the director Trevor Nunn by the actress Vanessa Redgrave (who has contributed a Foreword to this edition), "this early work...changed our perception of a major writer and still packs a hefty political punch" (London Independent). Written in 1938 and based on an actual newspaper story, the play follows the events of a prison atrocity which shocked the nation: convicts leading a hunger strike in a Pennsylvania prison were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. Williams later said: "I have never written anything since that could compete with it in violence and horror." Its sympathetic treatment of black and homosexual characters may have kept the play unproduced in its own time. But its flashes of lyricism and compelling dialogue presage the great plays Williams has yet to write. Not About Nightingales shows us the young playwright (for the first time using his signature "Tennessee") as a political writer, passionate about social injustice, and reflecting the plight of outcasts in Depression America. The stylistic influences of European Expressionism, radical American theatre of the 1930s, and popular film make it unique among the group of four early plays. Not About Nightingales has been edited by eminent Williams scholar Allean Hale, who has also provided an illuminating historical introduction.

This early play about coal miners struggling to improve their lives helped establish a young Tennessee Williams as a powerful new voice in American theater. The first full-length play by novice playwright Thomas Lanier Williams, Candles to the Sun opened on Thursday, March 18, 1937 and received rave reviews in the local press. The Mummers, a semi-professional and socially aware theater troupe in St. Louis, produced the play, and the combination of director Willard Holland''s theater of social protest and the young Williams'' talent for the dramatic depiction of poverty and its consequences proved irresistible to an audience eager for relevant social content. Set in the Red Hills coal mining section of Alabama, Candles to the Sun deals with both the attempts of the miners to unionize and the bleak lives of their families. Colvin McPherson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that "Williams, a 25-year-old Washington University senior, is revealed not only as a writer of unusual promise but one of considerable technical skill right now . . . . His writing is rarely unsteady and his play has an emotional unity and robustness. It stands on its own feet. Its characters are genuine, its dialogue of a type that must have been uttered in the author''s presence, its appeal in the theater widespread." As it turns out, Tom Williams had never met a miner in his young life. As he did for another early Williams play, Spring Storm, Dan Isaac uses his directorial skills to prepare a text of Candles to the Sun that is faithful to the 1937 production while providing readers (and actors) with a social and theatrical context. William Jay Smith, former Poet Laureate of the United States and St. Louis friend of the playwright, has contributed an illuminating foreword that touches not only on his memories of the young Tom Williams and the original production of Candles, but also on the poetic nature of Williams'' writing as reflected in this play.

This late play by Tennessee Williams explores the troubled relationship between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The late Tennessee Williams’s Clothes for a Summer Hotelmade its New York debut in 1980. Here Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, often seen as symbols of the doomed youth of the jazz age, become two halves of a single creative psyche, each part alternately feeding and then devouring the other. Set in Highland Hospital near Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda spent her last confinement, this "ghost play" begins several years after Scott’s death of a heart attack in California. But the past is "still always present" in Zelda, and Williams’s constant shifting of chronology and mixing of remembrance with ghostly re-enactment suggest that our real intimacy is with the shadow characters of our own minds. As Williams said in the Author’s Note to the Broadway production: "Our reason for taking extraordinary license with time and place is that in an asylum and on its grounds liberties of this kind are quite prevalent: and also these liberties allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is truth of character." Williams poses the inevitable, unanswerable questions: Did Scott prevent Zelda from achieving an independent creativity? Did Zelda’s demands force Scott to squander his talents and turn to alcohol? Whose betrayal––emotional, creative, sexual––destroyed the other? But he poses these questions in a new way: in the act of creation, Zelda and Scott are now aware of their eventual destruction, and the creative fire that consumed two artists combines symbolically with the fire that ended Zelda’s life.

The peak of my virtuosity was in the one- act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers on a rope. Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams''s lesser-known one-act plays reveal a tantalising and fascinating perspective to one of the world''s most important playwrights. Written between 1934 and 1980, the plays of the very young writer, then of the successful Tennessee Williams, and finally of the troubled man of the 1970s, this volume offers a panoramic yet detailed view of the themes, demons, and wit of this iconic playwright. The volume depicts 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 collection 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 precursor to A Streetcar Named Desire. Plays included are: At Liberty, The Magic Tower, Me, Vashya, Curtains for the Gentleman, In Our Profession, Every Twenty Minutes, Honor the Living, The Cast 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 and Some Problems for The Moose Lodge. The volume also features a foreword by Terence McNally.

Here are the eleven remarkable stories of Tennessee Williams''s first volume of short fiction, originally published in 1948 and reissued as a paperbook in response to an increasingly insistent public demand. It was this book which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In "One Arm" we live through his last hours and memories with a ''rough trade" ex-prizefighter who is awaiting execution for murder. "The Field of Blue Children" explores some of the strange ways of the human heart in love, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in "The Glass Menagerie," while "Desire and the Black Masseur" is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. "The Yellow Bird," well known through the author''s recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister''s daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology.

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

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."

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

Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams had never written a single play he would still be known as a distinguished poet. The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. ufeffTennessee Williams''s fame as a playwright has unjustly overshadowed his accomplishment in poetry. This paperback edition of In The Winter of Cities-his collected poems to 1962-permits a wider audience to know Williams the poet. The poems in this volume range from songs and short lyrics to personal statements of the greatest intensity and power. They are rich in imagery and illuminated by the psychological intuition which we know so well from Williams''s plays.

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.

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. 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.

What''s not to like about Tennessee Williams''s most forthright work about homosexual love, with its gay figure skaters, runaways, and sex?

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 Anymoreis a passionate examination of a woman''s life as she recounts her memoirs in the face of death. In The Night of the Iguanaa group of diverse people are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel, all imprisoned in their own way.