This series provides comprehensive reading and study guides for some of the world's most important literary masterpieces.

Here are the eleven remarkable stories of Tennessee Williams's first volume of short fiction, originally published in 1948 and reissued as a paperbook in response to an increasingly insistent public demand. It was this book which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In One Arm we live through his last hours and memories with a 'rough trade" ex-prizefighter who is awaiting execution for murder. "The Field of Blue Children" explores some of the strange ways of the human heart...

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams brings together in matching format the plays of one of America's most persistently influential and innovative dramatists. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes for all full-length plays.

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams brings together in matching format the plays of one of America's most persistently influential and innovative dramatists. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes for all full-length plays.

It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams s most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams s unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters ofA Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeurwith precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with...

Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams...

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 Carre: 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...