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.

THE STORY: As in its later and substantially re-written version (entitled ORPHEUS DESCENDING), the play deals with the arrival of a virile young drifter, Val Xavier, in a sleepy, small town in rural Mississippi. He takes a job in the dry goods stor

"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.

One of Tennessee Williams's first plays, "Not About Nightingales" portrays the lives of inmates in a Pennsylvania prison who were steamed to death after leading their fellow prisoners on a hunger strike.

A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams's work.--World Literature Today

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.