Search results for ""author tennessee williams""

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.

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A sizzling drama of desire, avarice and deception set in the American Deep South, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is published in Penguin Modern Classics.'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making.Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972).If you enjoyed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you might like Williams's The Glass Menagerie, also published in Penguin Modern Classics.'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself ... he is, quite simply, indispensable'Peter Shaffer, author of Equus

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"The Theatre of Tennessee Williams" brings together in a matching format the plays of one of America's most influential and innovative dramatists. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes.

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An erotic, sensual, and comic novel that was a generation ahead of its time, Moise and the World of Reason has at its center the need of three people for each other: Lance, the beautiful black figure skater full of love and lust for young men as well as a craving for drugs; the nameless gay young narrator, a runaway writer from Alabama who lives near the piers of New York City’s West Village, c. 1975, frantically filling notebooks with his observations; and Moise, a young woman who speaks in riddles and can never finish her paintings or consummate her affairs. The long unavailable Moise and the World of Reason represents a kind of uncensored Williams, radically frank, fully articulated, and deeply tender: a true gem.

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This series of plays for the 11-16 age range offers contemporary drama and new editions of classic plays. The series has been developed to support classroom teaching and to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum Key Stages 3 and 4. The plays are suitable for classroom reading and performance; many have large casts and an equal mix of parts for boys and girls. Each play includes strategies and activities to introduce and use the plays in the classroom. "The Glass Menagerie" tells the story of Tom, who is frustrated in his job and distressed at home by the mental withdrawal of his crippled sister. Both of them are intrigued by a set of glass figures. There are four parts, two male and two female.

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In these three exotic, steamy dramas Tennessee Williams portrays loss, faded lives and passionate love affairs.The Rose Tattoo is set in a bustling, Sicilian-American community, where newly widowed Serafina is paralysed by grief, until she has her romantic illusions about her dead husband shattered and rediscovers her true nature as a fiery prima donna, in a life-affirming celebration of love and sex. Tennessee Williams explores a new 'wild and unrestricted' theatrical form in the colourful tropical fantasy Camino Real, while Orpheus Descending, however, takes us into the dark territory of the Deep South: the corrupt hell of a small, brutal township, where a forbidden and tragic love affair sparks horrific violence.

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In celebration of the Tennessee Williams centennial in 2011, The Library of America presents its acclaimed two-volume edition of his plays in a collector's boxed set. Gathering thirty-two works written from the 1930s to the 1980s, this collection contains all the essential dramatic works of the playwright who transformed the American stage. The first volume opens with the rediscovered early plays, Spring Storm and Not About Nightingales, and contains such classics as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as well as a selection of one acts. The second volume includes Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, Period of Adjustment, The Night of the Iguana, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Out Cry, and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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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.

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Heinemann Plays is a well established series offering the best of contemporary drama and a wide range of established classics, in value-for-money hardback versions. The series has been specially developed to support classroom teaching and performance. Within the series there are plays for the full 11-17 age range. The series also contains the best of contemporary writing, and new editions of classic plays. Heinemann Plays are sewn and bound in sturdy hardback covers, guaranteeing longer life. Heinemann Plays are ideal for class reading and performance, many with large casts and an equal mix of parts for boys and girls. Set against the steamy backdrop of the New Orleans old quarter in summer, A Streetcar Named Desire depicts the conflict between a fading Southern Belle from an old colonial family and the brash, tough, lower-class, city society her sister has married into. Familiar Tennessee Williams themes are touched on: survival, death, sexual passion, madness and the haunting legacy of the past. This edition contains notes and activities to enhance understanding and enjoyment of the play.

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'Disturbing, moving, and funny; these stories help amplify Williams's tragic vision, for like the plays, they underline his preoccupation and insight into the conflicts of the human heart'New York TimesAcclaimed as one of America's most successful playwrights, Tennessee Williams also published four volumes of short stories. In Collected Stories, these volumes are combined with a wealth of unpublished and uncollected work, ranging from his first his story published in `Weird Tales' when William was seventeen, to his later frank homosexual fantasies. Williams was famous for insisting he write every morning. Even during his darkest days, while mourning a lover, or abusing some substance - he would write. The Collected Stories are from every period of his life, and recreate the milieux Williams knew and chronicled so movingly - from his gypsy youth in St. Louis and New Orleans to his days of celebrity in Hollywood and New York.'The two ingredients of Williams's plays - great gab and steamy sex - are both here in the stories' Edmund White, Sunday Times

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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.

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Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally." This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

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‘Tennessee Williams's mordantly funny and deeply troubled meditation on the desperate dismay of ageing and the iniquities of racial bigotry.’ INDEPENDENT ‘It’s a wonderfully weird play, starting claustrophobic, losing intensity as it introduces the locals… then regrouping for a devastating second half… This unruly, unforgettable play takes its unpredictable course to something that makes you feel afresh our powerlessness against time.’ THE TIMES When Chance Wayne left the small town of St. Cloud, he did so with the ambition of being an actor: now, many years later, he returns as a gigolo and the companion of faded movie star Alexandra del Lago. But can Chance convince the town he did actually make it big and win over his childhood sweetheart? Or will the mistakes of his past punish him still? Sweet Bird of Youth is Tennessee Williams's 1959 Broadway hit that explores the social and political climate of 1950s America, at a time when sexual freedom was a critical issue. This edition includes an introduction by Alison Walls that explores the play's production history as well as the dramatic, thematic and academic debates that surround it.

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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.

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Tennessee Williams knew how to tell a good tale, and this steamy, wrenching play about a faded movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, and about the lost innocence and corruption of Chance Wayne, reveals the dark side of the American dreams of youth and fame. Distinguished American playwright Lanford Wilson has written an insightful Introduction for this edition. Also included are Williams’ original Foreword to the play; the one-act play The Enemy: Time—the germ for the full-length version, published here for the first time; an essay by Tennessee Williams scholar, Colby H. Kullman; and a chronology of the author’s life.

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‘Williams’s favourite among his plays, [Cat on a Hot Tin Roof] is perhaps his most impassioned and articulate statement on human isolation, the wrenching problems of communication between people and the ways in which death defines life.’ NEW YORK TIMES In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a Southern family meet to celebrate 'Big Daddy' Pollitt's 65th birthday. But as the party unfolds, the facade of a happy family gathering is fractured by sexual frustration, repressed love and greed in the light of their father's impending death. This edition includes a commentary by Benjamin Hudson, which explores the major themes of the play, including illness and mortality; white supremacy through the plantation setting; mendacity and 'fake news'; alcoholism and addiction; as well as sexuality, womanhood and mid-century notions of masculinity. It draws attention to the context of the play, including the cultural, social and political landscape of the Mississippi Delta and St. Louis; the first-hand witnessing of Black life in the South; homosexuality and outsider sympathy; and American conservatism and the idealised 1950s family. It also delves into recent productions and adaptations of the play, including the Bollywood and Antoine Fuqua film adaptations.

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A friendship struck in 1942 would last for forty-one years through critical acclaim and rejection, commercial success and failure, manic highs, bouts of depression, and serious and not-so-serious liaisons. Tennessee Williams’s and James Laughlin’s letters provide a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century.

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Tennessee Williams's evocation of loneliness and lost love, The Glass Menagerie is one of his most powerful and moving plays. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a new introduction by Robert Bray.Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arrive, Laura's romantic illusions are crushed.Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972).If you enjoyed The Glass Menagerie, you might like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself'Peter Shaffer, author of Equus

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This revised Student Edition includes an introduction by Daniel Ciba, which looks in particular at the play as a piece of realism or experimentalism and considers the play through the lens of Queer Identity. The introduction includes discussion of very recent revivals and adaptations of the play across the world. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams' first great popular success and an autobiographical play about his mother and sister, launched the brilliant and controversial career of this ground-breaking American playwright. Set in St Louis during the depression era of the 1930s, it is the poignant drama of a family's gradual disintegration, under pressure both from outside and within. METHUEN DRAMA STUDENT EDITIONS are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. A well as the complete text of the play itself, this volume contains: · A chronology of the play and the playwright’s life and work · an introductory discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created · a succinct overview of the creation processes followed and subsequent performance history of the piece · an analysis of, and commentary on, some of the major themes and specific issues addressed by the text · a bibliography of suggested primary and secondary materials for further study.

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It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s. Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.

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This revised Student Edition includes an introduction by Bess Rowen, Assistant Professor at Villanova University, US, which looks in particular at the play's treatment of rape, vulnerable people, mental institutions (especially in connection to Williams's own family), sexuality and sexual desire. A Streetcar Named Desire shows a turbulent confrontation between traditional values in the American South - an old-world graciousness and beauty running decoratively to seed - set against the rough-edged, aggressive materialism of the new world. Through the vividly characterised figures of Southern belle Blanche Dubois, seeking refuge from physical ugliness in decayed gentility, and her brutal brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams dramatises his sense of the South's past as still active and often destructive in modern America. METHUEN DRAMA STUDENT EDITIONS are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. A well as the complete text of the play itself, this volume contains: · A chronology of the play and the playwright’s life and work · An introductory discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created · A succinct overview of the creation processes followed and subsequent performance history of the piece · An analysis of, and commentary on, some of the major themes and specific issues addressed by the text · A bibliography of suggested primary and secondary materials for further study

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The greatest playwright of the American South, Tennessee Williams used his talent throughout his life to create brief plays exploring many of the themes that dominated his best-known works. Here, thirteen never-before-published one-act dramas reveal some of his most poignant and hilarious characters. From the indefatigable, witty and tough drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens to the disheartened poet Mister Paradise, and the extravagant mistress in The Pink Bedroom, these are tales of isolated figures struggling against a cruel world, who refuse to lose sight of their dreams.

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Arthur Miller.'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers'Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley Kowalski. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche's fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness.Tennessee Williams's steamy and shocking landmark drama, recreated as the immortal film starring Marlon Brando, is one of the most influential plays of the twentieth century.Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972).If you enjoyed A Streetcar Named Desire, you might like The Glass Menagerie, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny'Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather'One of the greatest American plays'Observer

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When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media--though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candour about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, more than thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight" success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays.

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For most of his Broadway plays Tennessee Williams composed an essay, most often for The New York Times, to be published just prior to opening—something to whet the theatergoers’ appetites and to get the critics thinking. Many of these were collected in the 1978 volume Where I Live, which is now expanded by noted Williams scholar John S. Bak to include all of Williams’ theater essays, biographical pieces, introductions and reviews. This volume also includes a few occasional pieces, program notes, and a discreet selection of juvenilia such as his 1927 essay published in Smart Set, which answers the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?” Wonderful and candid stories abound in these essays—from erudite observations on the theater to veneration for great actresses. In “Five Fiery Ladies” Williams describes his fascinated, deep appreciation of Vivien Leigh, Geraldine Page, Anna Magnani, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor, all of whom created roles in stage or film versions of his plays. There are two tributes to his great friend Carson McCullers; reviews of Cocteau’s film Orpheus and of two novels by Paul Bowles; a portrait of Williams’ longtime agent Audrey Wood; a salute to Tallulah Bankhead; a political statement from 1972, “We Are Dissenters Now”; some hilarious stories in response to Elia Kazan’s frequent admonition, “Tennessee, Never Talk to An Actress”; and Williams’ most moving and astute autobiographical essay, “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair.” Theater critic and essayist John Lahr has provided a terrific foreword which sheds further light on Tennessee Williams’ writing process, always fueled by Williams’ self-deprecating humor and his empathy for life’s nonconformists.

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