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The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I: 1920-1945

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Winner of the Morton N. Cohen Award  for a distinguished edition of letters,  Modern Language Association, 2001. When first published in 2000, Volume I of  The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams  was hailed as “indispensable” ( Choice ), a “carefully researched, fully documented study” ( Buffalo News ), and “a model edition of a significant set of letters by one of America’s leading writers” (MLA citation for the biennial Morton N. Cohen Award). Now available as a paperbook, it is hoped that this volume will help a widening circle of readers appreciate that the great American playwright was also “a prodigy of the letter” (Allan JaIon,  San Francisco Chronicle ). Tennessee Williams wrote to family, friends, and fellow artists with varying measures of piety, wit, and astute self-knowledge. Presented with a running commentary to separate Williams’s sometimes hilarious, often devious, counter-reality from truth, the letters form a virtual autobiography of the great American dramatist. Volume I of  The Selected Letters of Tennessee 1920-1945  includes 330 letters written to nearly seventy correspondents and chosen from a group of 900 letters collected by two leading Williams Albert J. Devlin, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at the Pennsylvania State University.

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

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Tennessee Williams

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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.

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