Features letters written by the American playwright, revealing his childhood experiences, college years struggling with goals, grades, and money, and his emerging relationships.

Tennessee Williams wrote to family, friends and fellow artists with equal measures of piety, wit, and astute self-knowledge. Presented with a running commentary to separate Williams' often hilarious, but sometimes devious, counter-reality from the truth, the letters form a kind of autobiography.

Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams ends with the unexpected triumph of The Glass Menagerie. Volume II extends the correspondence from 1946 to 1957, a time of intense creativity which saw the production of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Following the immense success of Streetcar, Williams struggles to retain his prominence with a prodigious outpouring of stories, poetry, and novels as well as plays. Several major film projects, including the notorious Baby Doll, bring Williams and his collaborator Elia Kazan into conflict with powerful agencies of censorship, exposing both the conservative landscape of the 1950s and Williams' own studied resistance to the forces of conformity. Letters written to Kazan, Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, publisher James Laughlin, and Audrey Wood, Williams' resourceful agent, continue earlier lines of correspondence and introduce new celebrity figures. The Broadway and Hollywood successes in the evolving career of America's premier dramatist vie with a string of personal losses and a deepening depression to make this period an emotional and artistic rollercoaster for Tennessee. Compiled by leading Williams scholars Albert J. Devlin, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at the Pennsylvania State University, Volume II maintains the exacting standard of Volume I, called by Choice: "a volume that will prove indispensable to all serious students of this author...meticulous annotations greatly increase the value of this gathering."

Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.

"There isn't a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."--Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post

"Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival"--Back cover.

A play produced only twice in the 1940s and now published for the first time reveals that Tennessee Williams anticipated the themes of Star Trek by decades.

All of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his unmistakable Mississippi drawl. 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. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions’ founder James Laughlin, who initially presented some of Williams’ verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams’s poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright’s collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis. The CD included with this paperbook edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads," poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."