SOURCE: Peden, William H. “Mad Pilgrimage: The Short Stories of Tennessee Williams.” Studies in Short Fiction 1, no. 4 (summer 1964): 243-50.

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

The short stories in Tennessee Williams (1914-), collected in One Arm (1948) and Hard Candy (1954),¹ have been largely overshadowed by the author's continuing success and notoriety as a playwright. In addition to possessing special interest as occasionally being the first or early versions of characters and situations eventually developed into full-length plays,² Williams' stories are important in their own right and are at their best a permanent addition to the “sick” fiction of the forties and fifties.

The world of Williams' stories possesses considerable variety of method, yet at the same time it is as limited and circumscribed as Poe's, which in some ways it resembles. His stories are alike in their preoccupation with what one Williams...