Back Plays 1937–1955

Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955

Edited by Kenneth Holditch and Mel Gussow

“The Library of America has published Tennessee Williams’s essential ‘Plays’—33 of them—in two volumes totaling about 2,000 pages. Not every play is included here, but these two volumes constitute all that matter, the works of a master of his craft, with all the author’s introductions, notes, and pertinent essays.”— The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News Museum exhibition: For Tennessee Williams, the play was the thing (that kept him going)
March 28, 2018

This Library of America volume is currently available only in the two-volume boxed set of Williams’s collected plays.

Tennessee Williams’s explosive, often violent, plays shattered conventional proprieties and transformed the American stage. They inspired some of the most famous productions and performances in theatrical and film history, and they continue to grip audiences all over the world. Now, in an authoritative two-volume edition, The Library of America collects the plays that define Williams’s extraordinary range and achievement.

This first volume begins with the stunning rediscovered plays of Williams’s early career: Spring Storm, a tragedy of provincial longing that prefigures the mood and language of his later work, and Not About Nightingales, a stark prison drama, produced in 1998 to international acclaim, that resounds with the playwright’s outraged idealism. With the autobiographical The Glass Menagerie in 1944, Williams attained what he later called “the catastrophe of success,” a success made all the greater by A Streetcar Named Desire, his most famous play and one of the most influential works of modern American literature.

Forging an idiom that uniquely blended lyricism and brutality, a tragic sense of life and a genius for comic observation, he continued to revolutionize the American theater with a series of masterpieces: the poignant and melancholy Summer and Smoke, the light-hearted erotic comedy The Rose Tattoo, the sprawling and surrealistic Camino Real, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Pulitzer Prize–winning portrayal of a ruthless family struggle. This volume also contains Battle of Angels (an early version of Orpheus Descending), and a selection of Williams’s one-act plays, including 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, The Property Is Condemned, and I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, a meditation on the life and work of D. H. Lawrence.

This edition includes a newly researched chronology of Tennessee Williams’s life, explanatory notes (including cast lists of many of the original productions), and an essay on the texts.

This volume is edited by Mel Gussow (1933–2005), who was a drama critic, a cultural writer at The New York Times, and author of several books, including Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, and by Kenneth Holditch, professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans, editor since 1989 of the Tennessee Williams Journal, and the author of In Old New Orleans.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955 is kept in print by a gift from Richard Poirier to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in memory of Richard Santino.
Table of Contents
Spring Storm

Not About Nightingales

Battle of Angels

I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix

From 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946)
- 27 Wagons Full of Cotton
- The Lady of Larkspur Lotion
- The Last of My Solid Gold Watches
- Portrait of a Madonna
- Auto-da-Fé
- Lord Byron’s Love Letter
- This Property Is Condemned
The Glass Menagerie

A Streetcar Named Desire

Summer and Smoke

The Rose Tattoo

Camino Real

From 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1953)
- “Something Wild”
- Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen
- Something Unspoken
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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ISBN: 978-1-88301186-4 1054 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 119 Library of America Series

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Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955

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