Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955
- ISBN-10
- 1883011868
- ISBN-13
- 9781883011864
- Series
- Tennessee Williams
- Category
- Drama / American / General
- Pages
- 975
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2000-10
- Publisher
- Library of America
- Author
- Tennessee Williams
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.
Forging an idiom that uniquely blended lyricism and brutality, a tragic sense of life and a genius for comic observation, he continued to revolutionize the American theater with a series of masterpieces: the poignant and melancholy Summer and Smoke, the light-hearted erotic comedy The Rose Tattoo, the sprawling and surrealistic Camino Real, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Pulitzer Prize–winning portrayal of a ruthless family struggle. This volume also contains Battle of Angels (an early version of Orpheus Descending), and a selection of Williams's one-act plays, including 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, The Property Is Condemned, and I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, a meditation on the life and work of D. H. Lawrence.
This edition includes a newly researched chronology of Tennessee Williams's life, explanatory notes (including cast lists of many of the original productions), and an essay on the texts.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays (LOA #81)
By Robert FrostThe core of this collection is the 1949 Complete Poems of Robert Frost, the last collection supervised by Frost himself. This version of the poems is free of unauthorized editorial changes introduced into subsequent editions.
-
Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
By Oscar Wilde, Merlin HollandThe Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde is the only truly complete and authoritative single-volume edition of Oscar Wilde's works, and is available in both hardback and this paperback edition.Continuously...
-
Where the Blood Mixes
By Kevin LoringWhere the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author's First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the...
-
Yankee Doodle: A Drama of the American Revolution
By Coley Banks TaylorYankee Doodle: A Drama of the American Revolution
-
Seven Days in May
By Fletcher Knebel, Charles Waldo BaileySet against a political Washington background, the story is about a military plot to take over the government.
-
Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood
By Lizzie FranckeWomen have been writing for movies since the earliest days of the industry. Tracing the history of women in the screenwriting profession - from Gene Gauntier's 1911 version of Ben...
-
365 Days/365 Plays
By Suzan-Lori Parks“Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most important dramatists America has produced.”—Tony Kushner “The plan was that no matter what I did, how busy I was, what other commitments I...
-
Three Plays by Terrence Mcnally
By Terrence McNally“Terrence McNally is one of our most original and audacious dramatists and one of our funniest.”—The New Yorker These three stunning plays are a testament to the extraordinary talent...
-
Three Plays
By August Wilson, Paul Carter HarrisonThis collection features Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, voted Best Play of 1984-85 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle, Fences, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Joe...
-
Incarnations: Three Plays
By Clive BarkerContains three of Clive Barkers's best-known plays, Colossus, The History of the Devil and Frankenstein in Love. Echoing Barker's major themes - the nature of good and evil, pain and...