Product Description
The author of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was never shy about drawing on his personal and family drama for stage material. This collection of 15 essays examines how Williams's confessional style and subject matter in turn influenced a diverse group of American playwrights over the past six decades.

Critical comparisons with William Inge, Edward Albee, Neil Simon, David Mamet, Beth Henley, Christopher Durang, Tony Kushner, and others reveal the complexity of his influence. A special feature of this collection is its emphasis on how Williams was received by African American dramatists, including Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks. The collection ends with an original interview with Edward Albee on why and how Williams influenced him. ... Read more

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The plays of Tennessee Williams are some of the greatest triumphs of the American theatre. If Williams is not the most important American playwright, he is surely one of two or three of the most celebrated, rivaled only by Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. But in a career that spanned almost five decades, he also produced two collections of poetry, two novels, four collections of stories, and scores of essays. This reference book offers a thorough review of the vast body of research on his works, along with a history of performance. The volume contains chapters devoted to particular works or clusters of works, and each is written by an expert contributor. Each chapter includes a discussion of the biographical context of the work or group of works; a survey of the bibliographic history; a summary of major critical approaches, which looks at themes, characters, symbols, and plots; a consideration of the major critical problems posed by the work; a review of chief productions and film and television versions; a concluding overview; and a bibliography of secondary sources. ... Read more

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Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject American Studies - Literature, printed single-sided, grade: very good, University of Paderborn (American Studies), course: Proseminar: New Orleans in Literature, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper will compare and contrast the written form of TennesseeWilliams' play $6WUHHWFDU1DPHG'HVLUH1 with the 1951 movie version.2 Itwill explain and discuss the major differences between the two, focusingon the issue of censorship as it was an important factor in thedevelopment of the play from its Broadway form into a film. As this paperwill show this was due to the fact that during the 1940s and 50s the worldof theater in America was much more permissive than that of film. Thispaper will also examine Williams' concept of a 'plastic theater', aninnovative approach by him which utilized music, sound effects, movementand lighting to express abstract themes. His idea of a 'plastic theater', wascloser to the world of film than to the traditional form of the stage and isevident in $6WUHHWFDU1DPHG'HVLUH. It influenced the adaptation of theplay to the big screen.[...] ... Read more

Product Description
The eighth volume of Tennessee Williams's collected plays - for the first time in paperback. Contains the following four plays:

• Vieux Carré: " Williams is completely in control here."—London Times

• A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur: "Collections should include this view of a lady who does not despair, in order to have the full picture of his prismatic Southern heroines."—Library Journal

• Clothes for a Summer Hotel: "A masterpiece utterly original, freshly imagined in style and substance."—Choice

• The Red Devil Battery Sign: "It is essential Williams."—English Studies

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams presents, in matching format, the plays of one of America's most consistently influential and innovative dramatists. Now available as a paperback, Volume VIII adds to the series four full-length plays written and produced during the last decade of Williams' life, including original cast listings and production notes.

The text used for each play was corrected and revised by the playwright in preparation for publication, or, in the case of the posthumously published Red Devil Battery Sign, makes use of his last known revision. ... Read more

Product Description
Published in 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire garnered Tennessee Williams the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics' Award. Considered a lyrical masterpiece, the drama reveals the destructive impact that ensues when romantic impulse encounters animal vitalism.

The title, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics.This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Tennessee Williams, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

One Of TheBest!!
A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams is one of the best plays that I have read in years.First adapted to film in 1951, by Oscar Saul. I must recommend this play to all theatre directors out there and say that this would be a very large hit.

Once again, I say that A Streetcar named desire is one of the best plays I have read. ... Read more

Product Description
Mrs Stone changed from a rich American actress to a very rich American widow, but the transition took place as her legendary beauty slipped away, and so she escaped to Rome, the Eternal City. Frantic, she decides to take a lover, but in the end it is too high a price to pay for her dignity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

the roman spring of mrs stone
This small gem of a book is a brilliant study of an ageing star living in Rome after world war 2. it tracks her gradual decline as her sense of herself is deteriorates through a sad set of circumstances .It is absolutely beautifully written and unforgettable .
It is a pity Tennesse Williams is so little read these days . The collection of short stories is also brilliant . Neither have really dated and i would hope a new audience will rediscover a brilliant writer who leaves many modern writers looking like amateurs

The Roman Spring
Wonderful, thought provoking, short novel by Tennessee Williams. This was apparently one of his first and it immediately draws you in. This is a short story so you can easily finish it in one or two days.

"What's talent but the ability to get away with something?"
Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tennessee Williams abandons his southern roots by setting his fascinating first novel (1950) in Rome, just after World War II.An American actress, recently widowed, decides to live in Rome after retiring from the stage.Karen Stone, now in her fifties, is still nursing her ego after attempting but failing to be a convincing Juliet, the critics having cruelly pointed out her advanced age.Sensitive about the loss of her beauty and her plummeting career, Mrs. Stone plans to lead a less visible life in Rome.

Making the acquaintance of the Contessa, a friendly but cruelly manipulative and impoverished woman who introduces her to a series of beautiful young men, Mrs. Stone allows herself to be escorted but refuses the young men's other favors.Even with Paolo, the most attractive of her escorts, she maintains her dignity, until, after a particularly bitter argument, she realizes that she can use him for sexual pleasure, without guilt or remorse, since there is no possibility of unforeseen biological consequences.

As Mrs. Stone explores her sexuality in an effort to prove her desirability, Williams is remarkably candid about the characters' relationships. Sensitively, and with an expert eye for the vulnerability of women of a "certain age," he explores Mrs. Stone's relationship with a long-time female friend, her seemingly passionless marriage to Tom Stone, her budding sexual liberation, and Paolo's relationships with other men and women.Gradually, Mrs. Stone becomes more dependent on Paolo for emotional support while Paolo demands more of Mrs. Stone's financial support, until they both reach breaking point.

Williams's vibrant dialogue successfully reveals the tensions and expectations of Mrs. Stone, the Contessa, and Paolo through their conversations, but Williams is also startlingly adept at incorporating symbols which add to the intensity of the internal action.The seasons, the imagery of birds, and even Mrs. Stone's name enhance the plot and themes, while the action ironically mimics the Romeo/Juliet tragedy.Small details add to this irony--a handsome young man follows Mrs. Stone, and as she gazes at him from the top floor of her apartment near the Spanish Steps, the Romeo/Juliet balcony scene comes to mind.Though the novel is sometimes melodramatic, it never becomes maudlin, and the conclusion, totally different from the two films based upon it, involves an emotional resolution, rather than dramatic action. n Mary Whipple

Vintage Williams
Tennessee Williams is, of course, one of the country's master dramatists.So much emphasis is placed on his plays, however, that it is easy to forget that Williams--poet, novelist, essayist--was a true man of letters.Whileit lacks the intensity of "Streetcar" or the heartbreakingtenderness of "The Glass Menagerie," "The Roman Spring ofMrs. Stone" is vintage Williams just the same.Williams once saidthat he was interested in characters who "were frightened of life. ..who were desperate to reach out to another person."Karen Stone, alonely, fragile woman who is desperate to "stop the drift"following the death of her husband and her own fading youth and beauty, issuch a character.It will never be considered one of his masterpieces, butit will touch your heart in a way that only Williams can.

Woman Power, Menopause and Nihilism
Mr. Williams has managed, yet again, to create a tragic, flawed and brave heroine who stands unique amongst his other memorable female portrayals.

Newly widowed, the over-indulged and aging socialite Mrs. Stone travels to Rome where, amongst her circle of charmed and wealthy peers, she discovers truths about her own inner life as well as the seedy underbelly of the society in which she'd til now played a prominent and sneering role.

A developing, doomed relationship with a young Italian call-boy (controlled by an equally memorable female pimp) uncovers Mrs. Stone's latent passion and lonliness, leading ultimately to a melodramatic submission to the nihilism of anonymous sex.

The depth of Mrs. Stone's passion combined with her reserved dignity represent (to me) the singular beauty and subtle power increasingly inherent in women as we grow older. A beauty and power that are still tragically devalued and discouraged by our society today, more than 30 years after this timeless prose was written.

Read this book for yourself, and for all of the women in your life. ... Read more

Product Description
Few playwrights write as much of their lives into every work as did Tennessee Williams, and few had lives that were so obviously theatrical. In this frank, compelling study, the distinguished biographer and critic Ronald Hayman explores the intersection of biography and art in one of the most exuberantly autobiographical dramatists of the American theater.More than any previous biographer, he unmasks the compulsive, driven man behind the characters Williams created in such plays as The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams will change the way lovers of drama experience and understand some of its finest achievements. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

One of the Best Books on Tennessee Williams
It's a crime this book is so little known even by admirers of Tennessee Williams.Although published by an academic publishers, it's a straightforward biography, deeply researched and printed on excellent paper stock with many rare photographs.Mr. Williams' sad personal decline and personal shortcomings are not ignored but this clear-eyed book also celebrates the genius that he was.This is one of the best written accounts on the greatest playwright America has ever produced. ... Read more

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Tennessee Williams' plays are performed around the world, and are staples of the standard American repertory. His famous portrayals of women engage feminist critics, and as America's leading gay playwright from the repressive postwar period, through Stonewall, to the growth of gay liberation, he represents an important and controversial figure for queer theorists. Gross and his contributors have included all of his plays, a chronology, introduction and bibliography. ... Read more

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Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright's own 1938-39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes it form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants or his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carré: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York making at last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love—both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, and education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that "writers are shameless spies," who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget.

Building on two decades of Williams scholarship since Vieux Carré was originally published, Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, has provided a new introduction for this edition, giving the most authoritative account yet of its background and genesis. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Wonderful Later Play
*Vieux Carre* is probably the finest play of Williams' "Late" period--and it's terrific, though unfairly neglected.It's much more like the earlier work in terms of a "straight" narrative, and as good as it is I think we'll be seeing many more productions of it in the future. ... Read more

Product Description
Fifteen distinguished scholars contribute original essays that analyze A Streetcar Named Desire from various critical or cultural stances, methods, or modalities. Represented are the theories of Lacan and Foucault and the tenets of Marxism; the approaches of Feminism, Reader Response Criticism, Deconstructionism, Chaos and Anti-Chaos Theory, Translation Theory, Formalism, Mythology, Perception Theory, and Gender Theory; and the perceptions of Popular Culture, Film History and Theory, Southern Letters, and assorted cultural and regional studies. Viewing the play through multifaceted lenses, the essayists open up the script and expand our awareness of the problems and possibility offered by this great modern classic. ... Read more

Product Description
A guide to reading "The Glass Menagerie" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

I object!

I don't agree with those Amazon readers who wrote reviews that 'The Glass Menagerie'is bad. I object! It's like saying Beethoven is a drag; or that Picasso is in need of glasses. What such readers essentially mean is that it's not to their taste. Because they don't like it, it just can't possibly be good. I think if they could manage to drag themselves away from 'Desperate Housewives', for a moment, they'd be able to learn that sensitive and intelligent writing about women is possible, as Tennessee Williams' great masterpiece 'A streetcar Named Desire', 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', and 'The Glass Menagerie' reveal so well. George Ehrenhaft's a good place to sample what Streetcar & Glass Menagerie are all about; or why I'm making such a fuss about them.

The Glass Menagerie
So many people want to dislike this play because it is so well known. Colleges and High Schools are known to always to do this play. But it is a sensitive piece of work and is a great piece to preform. Laura's character is so self- conscious and fragile in contrast to her boasterous and out going ex-southern belle mother. This is also interesting because it is actually based upon Tennesse William's family situation. The Charracters are well developed, interesting and natural dialogue and the plot is very interesting.

And so it was I entered the broken world...
5 Stars -- for being the worst book I ever read!

intriguing and disturbing.
One of the classics of our time.Perhaps the most thought provoking play I have ever encountered.

Damn, it's the badest book I ever had to read!
It's not neccesary to read that book - or maybe I'm to stupid to do :- ... Read more