Selected Letters, Volume ll: 1945-1957

by Tennessee Williams

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.”

Genres: Nonfiction

662 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2004

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.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tennessee Williams was a revolutionary. No, I don't mean he revolutionized the American theater, that's been fairly well established and documented. There was Broadway before Tennessee, STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and Brando in 1947, and afterwards. These brutally honest letters to friends, lovers, producers, directors, his feared mother Miss Edwina and beloved grandfather the Reverend Dakin, and doomed "sob sister" Carson McCullers, brilliantly catalogued and annotated by Albert Devlin, reveal something more startling and little appreciated back then or today. Tennessee set out to shake up America from the doldrums of the Cold War, McCarthyism and the cultural and political lethargy of the Truman-Eisenhower double whammy. Williams brought the bedroom, hetero and homosexual, out of the dark and in front of the frightened and complacent American public, a feat that took more courage than being a Communist during these years. After the Broadway smash of THE GLASS MENAGERIE in 1945 the easy thing for Williams to have done was coast on success. Instead he moved to Rome, took many lovers openly in front of the Italian and American press, and went to work on STREETCAR, "too big for the current theater", which would either bring him immortality or consignment to what TIME magazine, his fiercest critic, called "the fetid swamp" of American letters, along with O'Neill, Inge, and Miller. STREETCAR is a profoundly political play. The rape of Blanche by Stanley is the culmination, "we've had this date from the beginning", of America's obsession with materialism, success, and destruction of lonely voices. Tennessee championed those voices in further triumphs, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, the sexual comedy THE ROSE TATOO, SUMMER AND SMOKE, and flops, ORPHEUS DESCENDING, and his one overtly political statement, CAMINO REAL. These were not the works of a small ego. Williams confesses in these letters he is "the most selfish person I know", and his treatment, and mistreatment of long-time partners, above all "the love of his life", Frank Merlo, make clear that was an understatement. These twelve years at the top also showcase William's "blue devil" addictions. When depressed or overworked he took solace in Secanol and other assorted "barbies", washing them down with alcohol. A sour love affair often saw him flee for one or a dozen "lays" in Rome, Hamburg, London or his haunt with Merlo at Key West. Seldom has a genius paid a higher price for his art than Tennessee Williams, and rarely has a man of letters gifted his nation, a nation he intentionally scandalized, with so many priceless jewels.