Tennessee Williams

"Blanche DuBois, a haggard and fragile southern beauty finds her pathetic last grasp at happiness cruelly destroyed in large part by her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski." "A study of sexual frustration, violence, and aberration, set in New Orleans, in which Blanche Dubois' fantasies of refinement and grandeur are brutally destroyed by her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, whose animal nature fascinates and repels her." Oxford Companion to English...

The peak of my virtuosity was in the one- act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers on a rope. Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams's lesser-known one-act plays reveal a tantalising and fascinating perspective to one of the world's most important playwrights.
Written between 1934 and 1980, the plays of the very young writer, then of the successful Tennessee Williams, and finally of the troubled man of the 1970s, this volume offers...

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as "splendidly written, precise, short, complete, and fine." It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow recently a famous stage beauty, but now "drifting." The novel opens soon after her husband's death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting,...

The vengeance of Nitocris -- A lady's beaded bag -- Something by Tolstoi -- Big black: a Mississippi idyll -- The accent of a coming foot -- Twenty seven wagons full of cotton -- Sand -- Ten minute stop -- Gift of an apple -- The field of blue children -- In memory of an aristocrat -- The dark room -- The mysteries of the Joy Rio -- Portrait of a girl in glass -- The angel in the alcove -- Oriflamme -- The vine -- The malediction -- The important...

"This play tells "the story of a minister's daughter in the stagnant little town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, and a love affair thwarted by her inhibitions."" --

After being exiled from her hometown of Auriol, Mississippi for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English, Blanche DuBois arrives unexpectedly at the New Orleans home of her pregnant sister Stella Kowalski and her Stella's husband Stanley. Stanley, both repulsed and attracted to Blanche, discovers that she has mortgaged property left to both sisters and spent all the money whereby he sets about discovering everything...

Cotton-mill owner Archie Meighan, married to nineteen-year-old "Baby Doll", looks forward to the day his wife turns twenty and will finally allow him to sleep with her. But he has competition in the form of sly business competitor Silva Vacarro, who covets both Archie's cotton mill AND his young and beautiful wife.