Synopses & Reviews
"While I have, over the years, read many collections of letters by famous writers, few have moved me as much as those by Tennessee Williams. There is no artifice to these letters, no calculation, no awareness of posterity looking over the shoulder. What there is, instead, is a revelation of the author's creative process, an unedited outpouring of Williams' mind and heart andperhaps most wonderfully!the sound of his voice, for he wrote these letters as he spoke, and his inflections, his intonations, are there in full. You cannot read these letters without hearing Tennessee speaking them."Edward Albee
Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams ends with the surprise Broadway triumph of The Glass Menagerie in 1945. Volume II extends the correspondence from 1945 to 1957, a time of intense creativity for Williams, which saw the production of six major plays and several major film projects, especially the notorious Baby Doll, which brought Williams and his main collaborator Elia Kazan into conflict with powerful agencies of censorship, revealing Williams' 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. His Broadway and Hollywood successes vie with a string of personal losses and a deepening depression, making this period an emotional and artistic roller coaster. Through it all, his wit, aplomb, mischievousness, and wickedly keen eye for human idiosyncrasies make it clear why Gore Vidal, upon reading the letters, declared Williams "the most distinctive, humorous, American voice since Mark Twain."
Synopsis
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."
About the Author
Albert Devlin, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at Pennsylvania State University, earned the 2001 Morton N. Cohen Award given by the Modern Language Association for Volume I of the Selected Letters "for a distinguished edition of letters."