In the following essay, Palmer traces the impact and influence of Williams's writing on the development of American theater and film.

In the following essay, Weaver provides an overview of Williams's early short stories.

In the following essay, Schiavi elucidates the role of feminine hunger in Williams's short fiction.

In the following essay, May investigates the cause of Brick's malaise and alienation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, arguing that Williams's story “Three Players of a Summer Game” offers insight.

In the following essay, Hale discusses autobiographical aspects of “The Preacher's Boy.”

In the following essay, Reck identifies three ways Williams utilized his short fiction in his plays.

In the following essay, Hitchcock demonstrates the significance of “The Vengeance of Nitocris” to Williams's later work.

In the following essay, Wolter outlines the prevalent critical approaches to Williams's short stories.

In the following essay, Sarote examines Williams's treatment of discrimination and resistance to mainstream American "normalcy" in his three major plays. According to Sarote, "Streetcar, like most of Williams's works can be interpreted as a plea for a less repressive, more fluid, more androgynous American Society."

In the following essay, Armato studies Williams's portrayal of human perceptions of death in his dramas, concluding that "underneath the guise of southern decadence, Tennessee Williams practices the art of a decidedly Christian playwright.

In the following essay, Presley identifies three philosophical dilemmas confronted by Williams's central characters—"isolation, the absence of God, and the reality of death." Presley contends that Williams's most successful plays portray realistic psychological or social tensions rather than theological themes as found in his less effective later plays.

In the following essay, Martin perceives “Hard Candy” and “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” as revisions of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Tonio Kröger.

In the following essay, Beaurline traces the adaptation of the short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” into the play The Glass Menagerie.

In the following essay, Timpane examines Williams's creation of female characters whose dynamic ambiguity resists the tendency toward idealization or oversimplification. Timpane contends that Williams offers "an authentic and authoritative depiction of female foolishness, limitations, and error."

In the following essay, Derounian examines the connection between the story “The Kingdom of Earth” and Williams's later play Kingdom of Earth, focusing on his use of parody in both works.

In the following essay, Kolin asserts that the story “Interval” “bears scrutiny as a disclosure of Williams's view of art, sex, and the imagination, all fused in America's quintessential worlds of illusion making—Hollywood and Broadway.”

In the following essay, Saddik explores the connection between homosexuality and cannibalism in “Desire and the Black Masseur” and Suddenly Last Summer.

In the following essay, Peden elucidates the defining characteristics of Williams's short fiction.

In the following essay, Bloom considers Williams's achievements and shortcomings as a major American playwright and the influence of poet Hart Crane on his work.

In the following essay, Vidal considers Williams's stories as the “true memoir” of the author and underscores the role of physical desire in his short fiction.

Tennessee Williams' writing reveals a striking preoccupation with the problem of time. Like other modern dramatists, he has juxtaposed past and present, created worlds of fantasy, and employed mythical substructures in order to suspend the irrevocable forward direction of time in his plays. Williams frequently expresses the conflict between real and ideal in temporal terms; time, often as arch-enemy, is ranged with fact, necessity, body, mortality, and locked in combat with eternity, truth, freedom, ...

In the following essay, Hurley views “Desire and the Black Masseur” as an allegory of spiritual masochism.

In the following essay, Grande argues that humanity's metaphysical alienation is a central theme of Williams's fiction.

Tennessee Williams is a good storyteller, as theater audiences have long known…. Unlike most playwrights who try their hands at different forms, Williams is a remarkably strong prose writer—his fiction perhaps even more consistent in quality that his drama. (p. 647) [Williams' first collection, One Arm and Other Stories,] provides an interesting and characteristic sampling. "The Poet," "Chronicle of a Demise," and "The Yellow Bird" are clearly t...

Although they often contain sensational elements, Williams's plays are as moralistic as they are literary…. The plays are a series of moral allegories in which Williams, an entrenched puritan fascinated by his own and others' sinfulness, judges his characters. He is a moralist who exposes corruption: "I think that deliberate, conscienceless mendacity, the acceptance of falsehood and hypocrisy is the most dangerous of all sins. The moral contribution of my plays is that they uncov...

Critical dissatisfaction over Tennessee Williams' plays of the seventies has been almost unanimous…. [Critics charge that] Williams repeats himself by going over and over the same territory and … that his plays, for better or worse, are autobiographical. (p. 815)

Memoirs, which Williams consistently refers to as a "thing," moves back and forth between the near and distant past, between the struggle for success and the struggle to retrieve it. Quite legitimately, Williams may be capsulizing, rarefying facts to manageable size and form, presenting the essence rather than the graph of actuality. The author's life, as he sees it, is made accessible through the medium of written expression; we do not come to see what it is like to be Tennessee Willia...

Orpheus Descending is a better play than its dismal performance record suggests, a play which has yet to fulfill its potential in production but which even in the printed text represents a significant attempt to re-create myths in the context of our own time. Although I will consider only those myths with obvious referents in the text to the exclusion of whatever subconscious archetypes we might posit, Williams' autobiographical impulses are important, as he superimposed and strengthened the Orpheus ...

In A Streetcar Named Desire Williams synthesizes depth characterization, typical of drama that strives to be an illusion of reality, with symbolic theatrics, which imply an acceptance of the stage as artifice. In short, realism and theatricalism, often viewed as stage rivals, complement each other in this play. Throughout the 1940s Williams attempted to combine elements of theatricalist staging with verisimilitudinous plots and characters. His experiments either failed utterly, as in Battle of Angels in whi...

[Taylor's article, from which the following excerpt was taken, originally appeared in Masses and Mainstream, April, 1948.] [If], as in Williams' case, there was never more than a small patch of happy boyhood in a youth-time dominated by a developing family tragedy, by poverty and hard work and many menial jobs, his static stare will always give him back the same gloomy landscape in which even the small Eden seems a lying mirage and the relationship of forces remains fixed in an endless and can...

[Tennessee Williams takes] familiar characters, situations, and themes and then weaves them into a baroque conceit possessing neither original substance nor extrinsic value. The world so imagined hardly exists—or, at least, hardly deserves consideration—on any other level than the decorative: it offers us a group of charming grotesques, preserved in amber. What is Southern about it, really, is not a certain quality of perception, a sense of engagement between past and present, the public and t...

What has always fascinated me about Tennessee Williams, particularly in his early work, is the sense that the plays are never about what they appear to be about. They contain an opposing duality. In Glass Menagerie, Amanda Wingfield's mannered gregariousness is constantly at odds with Laura's fragile introversion; just as Tom's poetic yearnings tug against the Gentleman Caller's traditional American drive for 'getting on'. In Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche du Bois&...

In the following review, Hale analyzes the symbolism of the clock in “A System of Wheels.”

[Magid's essay, from which the following excerpt was taken, was originally published in Commentary, January, 1963.] The total effect of Williams' work has been to plunge ordinary conceptions of the male-female relation into such disorder that the services of a Harry Stack Sullivan seem needed to straighten them out again. The first of these grand subversions was the figure of Stanley Kowalski, which appeared before the American public and before the world in the person of Marlon Brando. Though...

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

If revenge is a dish that tastes best cold, then Donald Windham has certainly fixed himself a satisfying frozen dinner. He has published all the letters sent to him between 1940 and 1965 by Tennessee Williams [as Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham]. And, without ever losing his poise as a reticent editor and admiring friend, Windham allows the glorious bird to dip his own tail feathers in a pot of tar…. Throughout the quarter-century of mistreatment chronicled in the book, Windham m...

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...

For some time now, any number of epigones have been turning out better imitation Tennessee Williams plays than Williams himself has written lately. As a result, Williams was forced to abandon self-imitation for self-parody and produce several rather unsuccessful Williams pastiches. But In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel does not even qualify as poor parody: it makes The Seven Descents of Myrtle look, by comparison, like a triumphal ascent of Parnassus. It is a play by a man at the end of, not his talent (that was ...

The storm-waters are rising around the farmstead somewhere in rural Mississippi when Lot, coughing ominously, comes back to the family home with his new bride; everyone has fled except his half-brother Chicken, who sits morosely in the kitchen downing liquor from an earthenware jug when he is not carving indecent figures on the wooden table or entertaining his new sister-in-law by hurling a startled cat into the flooded cellar…. [Kingdom of Earth] reminds one occasionally of Pinter, but more frequent...

[The article from which this excerpt was taken was originally published as "American Blues: The Plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams," in Encounter, May, 1954.] If Willy Loman [of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman] is the desperate average man, Blanche DuBois is the desperate exceptional woman. Willy's collapse began when his son walked into a hotel apartment and found him with a whore; Blanche's when she entered "a room that I thought was empty," ...

Williams has written some of the most moving dramas of the modern theatre. He is such a grand old man that I suppose no one will tell him when a play simply stinks. And that is what This Is (An Entertainment) does—rankly and raucously. If this were merely an entertainment, we might try to respond in kind, but … [this is] an empty pretentious script….