The reader who approaches Tennessee Williams' Where I Live in the expectation of finding a unified statement of the playwright's philosophy of art or his metaphysics will be disappointed. There is really no pattern to the thirty short prose pieces included here other than chronology, since most of them are incidental works, written either as forewords or afterwords to published editions of the plays or written for newspapers in advance of the opening of new productions. However, for the reader who is content with brief and fleeting insights into the attitudes and feelings of the author on a wide range of topics—from a consideration of Elizabeth Taylor as "one of the great phenomena and symptoms of our time in America" to defenses of freedom and nonconformity as essential conditions for the creation of viable art—Where I Live is an exciting and gratifying work. Despite the fact...