Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955

Description

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.