Back Plays 1957–1980

Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957–1980

Orpheus Descending | Suddenly Last Summer | Sweet Bird of Youth | The Night of the Iguana | 9 other plays More

Edited by Kenneth Holditch and Mel Gussow

“For theater mavens, these fine new volumes of Tennessee Williams’s plays from the nonprofit Library of America are surely bargains…. The chronology and notes at the end of both of these volumes amount to a short biography.” — The Star Democrat

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.

Exploring human passion with daring and unflinching honesty, Tennessee Williams forged a poetic theater of raw psychological insight that fused realism and expressionism. Now, in an authoritative two-volume edition, The Library of America collects the plays that reveal a prophetic figure in American life and letters—a writer of generous sympathies and uncompromising frankness who reached wide audiences with plays that revolutionized the themes and styles of the modern theater.

This second volume traces Williams’s career as it evolved in his adventurous and sometimes shocking later works, including Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth, plays that stirred controversy when first produced because of their concern with acts of horrific violence; the satiric marital comedy Period of Adjustment; The Night of the Iguana, a moving drama set in Mexico that contains some of Williams’s most lyric writing, and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a re-imagining of the earlier Summer and Smoke.

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, with its use of Kabuki-like stylization, began a more experimental phase of Williams’s writing, represented here by Kingdom of Earth (also known as The Seven Descents of Myrtle), The Mutilated, Small Craft Warnings, and Out Cry. In late plays such as A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur and the autobiographical Vieux Carré, Williams returned to many of his earlier themes and settings.

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 1957–1980 is kept in print in honor of Darlene Marcos Shiley by a grant from The Shiley Foundation to the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Orpheus Descending

Suddenly Last Summer

Sweet Bird of Youth

Period of Adjustment

The Night of the Iguana

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

The Mutilated

Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle)

Small Craft Warnings

Out Cry

Vieux Carré

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

Or buy from our partners

ISBN: 978-1-88301187-1 999 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 120 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater LOA N°172

The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner LOA N°203

Eugene O'Neill: Complete Plays 1920–1931 LOA N°41

Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955 LOA N°119

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957–1980

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.