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

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."

Extending the author's correspondence from 1945 - 1957, a time of intense creativity in his life, Volume II of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams covers the production of six major plays, including 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, especially the notorious Baby Doll, bring Williams and his collaborator Elia Kazan into contact with powerful agencies of censorship, exposing both the conservative landscape of the 1950s and Williams' own studied resistance to the forces of conformity.

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.

Whether imaginary or based on real events, stories are at the core of any culture. Regardless of their length, their rhetoric strategies, or their style, humans tell stories to each other to express their innermost fears and needs, to establish a point within an argument, or to engage their listeners in a fabricated composition. Stories can also serve other purposes, such as being used for entertainment, for education or for the preservation of certain cultural traits. Storytelling is at the heart of human interaction, and, as such, can foster a dialogic narrative between the person creating the story and their audience. In literature, this dialogue has been traditionally associated with narrative in general, and with the novel in particular. However, other genres also make use of storytelling, including drama. This volume explores the ways in which American theatre from all eras deals with this: how stories are told onstage, what kinds of stories are recorded in dramatic texts, and how previously neglected realities have gained attention through the American playwright’s telling, or retelling, of an event or action. The stories unfolded in American drama follow recent narratology theories, particularly in the sense that there is a greater preference for those so-called small stories over big stories. Despite the increase in the production of this type of texts and the growing interest in them in the field of narratology, small stories are literary episodes that have been granted less critical attention, particularly in the analysis of drama. As such, this volume fills a void in the study of the stories presented on the American stage.

The Short Story in Midcentury America provides in-depth case studies of four major writers of the post–World War II era—Paul Bowles, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams—examining how they used the contained aesthetics of short fiction to map out an oppositional stance to the dominant narratives, both political and literary, of mid-twentieth century U.S. culture. Sam V. H. Reese presents a new understanding of the connections between politics, ideology, and literary form, arguing that writers employed the short story to critique the cultural mores of the early Cold War. The four authors under discussion found themselves socially marginalized by mainstream U.S. culture due to such factors as their gender, sexual orientation, religion, and foreign residence. Reese shows that each author embraced the short story’s compressed form as a means of resisting political coercion and conformity, speaking out in support of freedom and open expression. Reese argues that these four writers used the formal restrictions of the short story to develop a type of fiction that became recognizably countercultural, challenging the expansive, sprawling novels then receiving acclaim from critics. His analysis underscores the means by which each author’s short stories utilized the aesthetic practices of mediums outside conventional narrative fiction: Bowles’s career as a composer, McCarthy’s criticism and memoirs, Williams’s playwriting, and Welty’s photography. By studying both their prose and its conceptualization, Reese reveals how writers resisted the political and stylistic pressures that defined U.S. literary culture in the early years of the Cold War. In The Short Story in Midcentury America, Reese establishes a new framework for considering countercultural literature in the United States, reassessing the critical standing of the short story and re-evaluating the relationship between marginal social positions and literary form during the mid-twentieth century.