Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980 (Library of America)

Timeless!This must be in your collection. The Red Fur Room[...]A novel based on a true story. A coming of age experience of a naive young man named Sali Hand from a small southern town built on textile mills. With his boyhood friend they unwittingly visit an isolated coastal city, fallen to decay, for a town ritual. Hidden under a canopy of old oak trees drapped in spanish moss the beauty of this old place immediately arrests Sali's imagination and wonderous curiosity, and his heart is intoxicated with his first love. Incidentally Sali will not return home, and consequently his friend's destiny will leave him in pieces to be found hidden throughout the grand park that is home to the blight after dark. With certainty a plague will soon seep in from the trees and began slowly distilling the life from Sali's new found friends casting him into a dark nightmare he may not escape. With the rising hot air the spanish moss sweeps gracefully in slow rhythm over the arms that have embraced a culture for hundreds of years. It will now set the town on fire with fear.Due out this fall 2013

My review refers to the two Ten Williams volumes of the LoA.I love the LoA. The books give me the supreme pleasure in reading. They are so beautifully printed on optimal paper in an optimal size, that I sometimes read stuff that is not worth reading.I have read '10' for two reasons: 1. because I had bought the LoA, and 2. because I had read a lot about the 'glorious bird' in Gore Vidal's 2 volume memoirs. And then, of course, I had seen the Glass Menagerie on Stage and the Cat on the Hot Tin Roof in the movies. Can't remember what else I might have seen before I read this. I saw Suddenly Last Summer only after I read it. I never saw A Streetcar or the Iguana. Pity.Let me say straightforward, that I love half a dozen to maximum 10 of TW's plays. They are pulp material, they are trash, they are melodrama, and they are true, and gripping, and honest, and vulgar...And they are great.But the early plays are plain nothing, while the last few ones are abominable.It is impossible to draw a strict line when he started to write readable stuff and when he declined so badly that he stopped doing that. But for me it is clear: his early attempts are trash, and so are his last.My conclusion: the LoA would have done better to restrict themselves to one volume and then focus on the main phase.If they want to re-issue, I can offer advice as to which plays to include and which ones not.

Loved this. I was able to read all of the plays in one place. Many of his lesser works are present. You are able to keep all of them in one place with the ability to go between each play. This collection is as important to any play lovers collection as Shakespeare.

(Also a great collection of plays.)

Great playwrite in his grea period and subsequent decline.

Contains many of TW's later and more abstract works. The book is bound well, containing a ribbon placeholder. A must have for aspiring theater majors.

great edition of his plays

Great collection to have.

While I was a little disappointed in the thinness of the paper used in this volume, I am very happy with the contents, including essays and prefaces. Thank you for making this available.