It would have been a damned shame if Tennessee Williams couldn’t write, because I can’t think of any man of letters whose family and friends provided so much rich material.
Williams, who was a gifted playwright and a not bad short story writer, drew long and hard from the deep well of tormented and eccentric souls who populated his life from childhood on and appear in various guises in his best known works, including The Glass Menagerie (1945), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and The Night of the Iguana (1961).
Then there is A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was a Broadway hit with Marlon Brando, who played the immortal Stanley Kowalski, and Kim Hunter, Jessica Tandy and Karl Malden. Two years later, Streetcar was remade more or less intact for the big screen with Vivian Leigh replacing Tandy.
I don’t think I was ever in the same place (which is to say probably a restaurant or bar) with Williams, although our paths might have crossed in Key West in the 1970s without me realizing it.
My appreciation for him was based solely on the movie versions of Cat, Iguana and Streetcar until I began working with scholars who visit the rare book and manuscript library where I work. They come to study our fine collection of Williams typescripts, most of them heavily annotated by the man himself, who was notorious for repeatedly rewriting big chunks of his plays, in the case of Streetcar right up to the night of its Broadway opening.
These typescripts are extraordinary windows into his creative mind.
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