It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared--57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.

Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay The World I Live In, and a brief chronology of the author's life.

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 scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally. This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, The Catastrophe of Success, as well as a short section of Williams's own Production Notes. The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father's inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat. The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year. Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many years--the present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003-04 season. This definitive edition also includes Williams' essay Person-to-Person, Williams' notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author's life. One of America's greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright's perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now.

First published in 1947, 'A Streetcar Named Desire' is an American play by Tennessee Williams, an American playwright, and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

It centers on a desolated woman named Blanche DuBois. Raised in Old South aristocratic traditions, she lived elegantly in the family homestead, married a man she adored, and pursued a career as an English teacher. But her life fell apart when she discovered that her husband, Allen Grey, was having a homosexual affair. Humiliated, he killed himself.

Blanche sought comfort in the arms of other men, many men. After she had relations with one of her students, a 17-year-old, authorities learned of the encounter and fired her. Though scarred by her past, Blanche still tries to lead the life of an elegant lady and does her best, even lying when necessary, to keep up appearances.

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In this phantasmagorical play, the Camino Real is a dead end, a police state in a vaguely Latin American country, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature--Don Quixote, Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron--inhabit a place where corruption and indifference have immobilized and nearly destroyed the human spirit. Then, into this netherworld, the archetypal Kilroy arrives--a sailor and all-American guy with a heart as big as the head of baby. Celebrated American playwright John Guare has written an illuminative Introduction for this edition. Also included are Williams' original Foreword and Afterword to the play, the one-act play Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Michael Paller.

Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, lewd vagrant Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot.

Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a short morality play, has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial, the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion.

With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman -- he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer -- this volume also offers Williams's related essay, The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps, and a chronology of the playwright's life and works.

In celebration of the Tennessee Williams centennial in 2011, The Library of America presents its acclaimed two-volume edition of his plays in a collector's boxed set. Gathering thirty-two works written from the 1930s to the 1980s, this collection contains all the essential dramatic works of the playwright who transformed the American stage. The first volume opens with the rediscovered early plays, Spring Storm and Not About Nightingales, and contains such classics as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as well as a selection of one acts. The second volume includes Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, Period of Adjustment, The Night of the Iguana, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Out Cry, and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams had never written a single play he would still be known as a distinguished poet. The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry.

Tennessee Williams's fame as a playwright has unjustly overshadowed his accomplishment in poetry. This paperback edition of In The Winter of Cities-his collected poems to 1962-permits a wider audience to know Williams the poet. The poems in this volume range from songs and short lyrics to personal statements of the greatest intensity and power. They are rich in imagery and illuminated by the psychological intuition which we know so well from Williams's plays.

These tales were penned by one Thomas Lanier Williams of Missouri before he became a successful playwright, and yet his voice is unmistakable.

The reliable idiosyncrasies and quiet dignity of Williams's eccentrics are already present in his characters. Consider the diminutive octogenarian of The Caterpillar Dogs, who may have just met her match in a pair of laughing Pekinese that refuse to obey; the retired, small-town evangelist in Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite, who wears bright-colored pajamas and receives a message from God to move to St. Louis and finally, finally go to the movies again; or the distraught factory worker whose stifled artistic spirit, and just a soupçon of the macabre, propel the drama of Stair to the Roof.

Love's diversions and misdirections, even autoerotic longings, are found in these delightful lagniappes: in Season of Grapes, the intoxicating ripeness of summer in the Ozarks acquaints one young man with his own passions, which turn into a fever dream, and the first revelation of female sexuality blooms for a college boy in Ironweed.Is there such a thing as innocence? Apparently in the 1930s there was, and Williams reveals it in these stories.

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, too, to aging. (The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.) With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skillful as his play (Publishers Weekly).

The Rose Tattoo is larger than life--a fable, a Greek tragedy, a comedy, a melodrama--it is a love letter from Tennessee Williams to anyone who has ever been in love or ever will be. Professional widow and dressmaker Serafina delle Rosa has withdrawn from the world, locking away her heart and her sixteen-year-old daughter Rosa. Then one day a man with the sexy body of her late Sicilian husband and the face of a village idiot, Mangiacavallo (Italian for eat a horse), stumbles into her life and clumsily unlocks Serafina's fiery anger, sense of betrayal, pride, wit, passion, and eventually her capacious love.

The original production of The Rose Tattoo won Tony Awards for best play and for the stars, Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton. Anna Magnani received the Academy Award as Best Actress for the 1955 film version.

This edition of The Rose Tattoo has an Introduction by playwright John Patrick Shanley, the author's original foreword, the one-act The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View that was the germ for the play, and an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Jack Barbera.

Williams wrote: This is a play about love in its purest terms. It is also Williams's robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women's college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (the world's oldest living and practicing poet), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night.

This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by award-winning playwright Doug Wright, the author's original Foreword, the short story The Night of the Iguana which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch.

I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent--yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this...this...this angry, petulant old man.
--The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana

They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater.

Only one of these plays (The Purification) is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion) or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman (The Last of My Solid Gold Watches) or of delinquent children (This Property is Condemned), his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life--its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love--into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue.

Mr. Williams's views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, Something wild..., which serves as an introduction to this collection.

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 in love, Portrait of a Girl in Glass is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in The Glass Menagerie, while Desire and the Black Masseur is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. The Yellow Bird, well known through the author's recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister's daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology.

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

Theatre of Tennessee Williams Vol. 3 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and Suddenly Last Summer.

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the mediathough long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called a raw display of private life by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a starving artist, the overnight success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays.

And, of course, Memoirs is filled with Williams' amazing friends from the worlds of stage, screen, and literature as heoften hilariously, sometimes fondly, sometimes notremembers them: Laurette Taylor, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Vivian Leigh, Carson McCullers, Anna Magnani, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, and Tallulah Bankhead to name a few. And now film director John Waters, well acquainted with shocking the American public, has written an introduction that gives some perspective on the various reactions to Tennessee's Memoirs, while also paying tribute to a fellow artist who inspired many with his integrity and endurance.