Skip to content
Scan a barcode
Scan
Added to your cart
Hardcover Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980 Book

ISBN: 1883011876

ISBN13: 9781883011871

Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980 (Library of America)

Exploring human passion with daring and unflinching honesty, Tennessee Williams forged a poetic theater of raw psychological insight that fused realism and expressionism. Now, in an authoritative two-volume edition, The Library of America collects the plays that reveal a prophetic figure in American life and letters--a writer of generous sympathies and uncompromising frankness who reached wide audiences with plays that revolutionized the themes and styles of the modern theater. This second volume traces Williams's career as it evolved in his adventurous and sometimes shocking later works, including Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth, plays that stirred controversy when first produced because of their concern with acts of horrific violence; the satiric marital comedy Period of Adjustment; The Night of the Iguana, a moving drama set in Mexico that contains some of Williams's most lyric writing, and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a re-imagining of the earlier Summer and Smoke.

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, with its use of Kabuki-like stylization, began a more experimental phase of Williams's writing, represented here by Kingdom of Earth (also known as The Seven Descents of Myrtle), The Mutilated, Small Craft Warnings, and Out Cry. In late plays such as A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur and the autobiographical Vieux Carr?, Williams returned to many of his earlier themes and settings.

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.

Recommended

Format: Hardcover

Condition: Good*

*Best Available: (ex-library)

$14.39
Save $25.61!
List Price $40.00
Almost Gone, Only 1 Left!

Customer Reviews

customer rating | review

Rated 5 stars
KNOWN FACT: This was Tennessee Williams' least favorite play.

Summer and Smoke has always been my favorite Williams' play, even though he himself thought it was too melodramatic. The story concerns a woman named Alma Winemiller, an Episcopal minister's daughter in the town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi at the turn of the century. She's been in love with the boy next door since she was a little girl; John Buchanan, Jr. John, Magna Cum Laude from Johns Hopkins, has recently returned...

0Report

Rated 4 stars
The Flesh and the Spirit

Tennessee Williams's SUMMER AND SMOKE meditates on the flesh and the spirit, symbolically exploring their conflict and the role they play in human happiness. We witness here the damaging effect of embracing one at the expense of the other, for in the end we are left with the idea that one must complement the other if our lives are to be fulfilled. The play, like TW's other seminal works, takes place in the American...

0Report

Rated 5 stars
Beautiful, lyrical, haunting

This play was originally a failure when it was produced on Broadway. It was not until the 1952 Circle in the Square production directed by Jose Quintero and starring Geraldine Page (who also played the part to perfection in the 1962 film version) that the show became a success. The original production must have been poorly done, because the play is a masterpiece even when one simply reads it. An allegory that takes place...

0Report

Copyright © 2025 Thriftbooks.com Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information | Cookie Policy | Cookie Preferences | Accessibility Statement
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
GoDaddy Verified and Secured