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The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams Volume II 1945-1957

$22.95

Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams ended with the surprise Broadway triumph of The Glass MEnagerie in 1945. Volume II extends the correspondence from 1945 to 1957, a time of intense creativity for Williams, which saw the productions of six major plays-A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof among them-as well as several major film projects, including the notorious Baby Doll, the movie that brought Williams and his main collaborator Elia Kazan, into conflict with powerful agencies of censorship. An emotional and artistic roller-coaster characterizes the evolving career revealed in these letters. Williams’ wit, vitality and wickedly keen eye for human idiosyncrasies make it clear why Gore Vidal, upon reading the letters, declared him “the most distinctive, humorous, American voice since Mark Twain.”

Volume II of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams contains over 40 illustrations, and nearly 350 letters (written to ninety correspondents) chosen from a group of 800 letters collected by two Williams scholars: Albert J. Devlin, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at Pennsy;lvania State University.