Tennessee WilliamsTennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955 (Library of America)

I have rated this book of plays with five stars, just hope the person I have bought it for agrees, it was their choise!

I first got to know some of the plays of Tennessee Williams (1911 -- 1983) in the mid-1960s, and I have revisited his works often over the years. Last year, I had the opportunity to read John Lahr's biography, "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" (2014) which revitalized my interest in Williams. I decided to read or to reread Williams, using what I had learned from Lahr, in the Library of America two-volume collection of his plays. The first LOA volume, which I am reviewing here, consists of plays written between 1937 and 1955 as selected by two scholars of Williams: Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch. The volume includes a chronology of Williams' life, and information on the original productions and editions of the plays in addition to the texts.Williams' works have always moved me with their beautifully flowing lyricism, their romanticism, and sexuality and with the tension they dramatize between convention and individuality,religion and sex, love and violence. The boundaries of some of these tensions have changed since the 1940s and 1950s, but I think Williams stories, characters, and dilemmas are independent of particular times. They are also highly personal and autobiographical. At the outset of his biography, Lahr quotes Williams in the late 1930's vowing to write plays that "were a picture of my own heart". In Lahr's account, Williams later continued to aim "to be simple, direct, and terrible. I will speak truth as I see it.. without concealment or evasion and with a fearless unashamed frontal assault upon life." This volume and its companion allow the reader to measure whether and how well Williams succeeded in his aims.This volume shows the continuity in Williams' work, in themes characterizations, and settings from the earliest plays through the final work in the book, the "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". It also shows the diversity of which Williams was capable which may surprise those new to his work. The volume documents the hard-won nature of success even for a greatly gifted writer. Williams struggled with his writing for years, taking menial jobs, living in squalid rooming houses, and enduring failures. Although he often was tempted to give up, he persevered in doing what he was born to do.This book includes the three plays for which Williams is best remembered: his first Broadway play, "The Glass Menagerie" (1945), "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1957). Williams struggled with the final act of "Cat" and the version produced on Broadway and Williams' initial version both are included in this volume. Each of these three works have been revived many times and are masterworks of American literature and American theater. It is valuable to have them together in one beautifully bound book of American classics. But there is much more to the volume. Besides these three famous plays, I want to focus on some of Williams less well-known works.The book includes "Summer and Smoke", one of my earliest and favorite Williams plays which poignantly captures the battle between spirit and flesh in a small Mississippi town in the years of WW I. I loved revisiting this play, seeing the film for the first time, and reading Williams' later rewrite, "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" in the second LOA volume. This volume also includes a difficult work, "Camino Real", a play which failed at its opening but which in its expressivist character foreshadows Williams' late works.The surprise of the volume was "The Rose Tattoo". I had not been familiar with this work, but Lahr's discussion made me want to read it. I read the play and watched the film version which starred the famous Italian actress Anna Magnani. This is a lovely play about the power of love and sexuality and about the possibility of renewal in mid-life. It is a Williams masterwork which had escaped me.Williams early works and one-act plays, included in the book, are worth knowing in themselves and as foreshadowing what Williams would later write. The best and most surprising of these early plays is "Not about Nightingales", a drama of prison life, which Williams wrote in 1938 in St Louis. The play received its world premier in 1998 to great acclaim as a result of the efforts of Vanessa Redgrave. With social commentary unusual for a Williams play, this rough early work captures many of his themes. Williams' short play about the death of D.H. Lawrence, "I rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix" also is worth getting to know. In a short note to the play Williams wrote of Lawrence in words that also applied to himself, "Lawrence felt the mystery and power of sex, as the primal life urge, and was the lifelong adversary of those who wanted to keep the subject locked away in the cellars of prudery." Among the short plays in this volume, I most enjoyed "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" which became the basis of the 1955 movie "Baby Doll", and "This Property is Condemned", which was loosely adopted in a 1966 film starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford.Williams frequently added notes, prefaces or afterwards to his plays. His essays accompanying "The Glass Menagerie", "Battle ofAngels", and "The Rose Tattoo" are in this volume and particularly worth reading, as is the essay "Something Wild", which accompanied a collection of one-act plays. Williams wrote, explaining his understanding of local theater and the role of art:"Community theaters have a social function and it is to be that kind of an irritant in the shell of their community. Not to conform, not to wear the conservative business suit of their audience, but to let their hair grow long and even greasy, to make wild gestures, break glasses, fight, shout, and fall downstairs! When you see them acting like this -- not respectably, not quite decently, even! -- then you will know that something is going to happen in that outfit, something disturbing, something irregular, something brave and honest."The volume includes Williams' plays and attendant essays. It does not include his 1950 novel, "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" which I think belongs with his best work and should be preserved.I enjoyed rereading and thinking about Tennessee Williams again in the company of John Lahr and the Library of America. Most of Williams' plays are available in individual editions. I have posted reviews of many of them, or on the film versions of the plays, discussing them in more detail, for those readers who may be interested. Readers interested in American literature and in Tennessee Williams owe a debt of gratitude to the Library of America.Robin Friedman

Seller got product to me days earlier than estimate. Would definitely buy from seller again!Tennessee Williams is an icon of 20th century American theater; very good collection of his early and mid career work (there is also a volume 2 with later works).

très bon état

arrived fast exactly as described thank you

Huge fan of Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof so I had to own both and this collection is quite perfect. Loved the hardcover (although I'm not a fan of dust jackets) and the print is perfect. Nice clean font and well spaced words making reading easier.

テネシー・ウィリアムズは私がいちばん大好きな戯曲作家です。私自身、芝居の脚本を書いているのでなおさらです。現在、存在する日本語訳も良いですが、辞書をひきながら原文を自ら訳していくと、なんとも日本語訳よりも遥かに素晴らしい台詞の言い回しです。まだ訳してる途中ですが（ちなみに「ガラスに動物園」です）たいへん勉強になりそうです。ちなみにこの本のすごいところは、「ガラスの動物園」、「欲望という名の電車」、「やけたトタン屋根の上の猫」、テネシーの代表作3つが収録されていることです。その他、「夏の煙」、「薔薇のいれずみ」等、全部で25作品です！ところで、英語がスラスラ読める人がこんなにうらやましいのは初めてです＾＾；この本が日本で訳され、出版されてないのはちと寂しいです。たぶん日本語版だったら1万円ぐらいする本でしょうけど。