SOURCE: Peden, William. “Broken Apollos and Blasted Dreams.” Saturday Review 38, no. 2 (8 January 1955): 11-12.

In the following review, Peden offers a mixed assessment of One Arm and Other Stories.

Tennessee Williams's One Arm and Other Stories contains some stories which have greatness in them; of some of the others, however, John Randolph's irreverent comment about Henry Clay seems appropriate: how like a dead mackerel in the moonlight [are they], that shines and stinks, and stinks and shines.

Characteristic is “Desire and the Black Masseur,” the story of Anthony Burns, a little man with “an instinct for being included in things that swallowed him up” who is eventually devoured—literally, figuratively, and symbolically—by his Nemesis, a gigantic masseur. Here we are transported from the world of accustomed responses to one which is uniquely Mr. Williams's special province, a dimension compounded of fantasy, surrealism, allegory, and Gothic sensationalism. With a...