Tennessee Williams

Plays 1957–1980

Orpheus Descending • Suddenly Last Summer • Sweet Bird of Youth • The Night of the Iguana • 9 other plays

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 Carré, 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.

This volume is edited by Mel Gussow (1933–2005), who was a drama critic, a cultural writer at The New York Times, and author of several books including Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, and by Kenneth Holditch, professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans, editor since 1989 of the Tennessee Williams Journal, and the author of In Old New Orleans.

Also by Tennessee Williams:
Plays 1937–1955

Also of interest:
Eugene O'Neill: Complete Plays (three volumes)
Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater

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