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Tennessee Williams Books In Order

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Publication Order of Standalone Novels

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone(1950)Description / Buy at Amazon
Moise and the World of Reason(1975)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Collections

27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays(1945)Description / Buy at Amazon
One Arm and Other Stories(1948)Description / Buy at Amazon
Hard Candy(1954)Description / Buy at Amazon
Four Plays(1956)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Rose Tattoo and Other Plays(1957)Description / Buy at Amazon
Baby Doll and Other Plays(1958)Description / Buy at Amazon
Three Players Of A Summer Game, And Other Stories(1960)Description / Buy at Amazon
Five Plays(1962)Description / Buy at Amazon
In the Winter of Cities(1964)Description / Buy at Amazon
American Blues(1965)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays(1965)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Knightly Quest(1966)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dragon Country(1970)Description / Buy at Amazon
Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed(1974)Description / Buy at Amazon
Androgyne, Mon Amour(1977)Description / Buy at Amazon
It Happened the Day the Sun Rose(1983)Description / Buy at Amazon
Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays(1984)Description / Buy at Amazon
Collected Stories(1985)Description / Buy at Amazon
Baby Doll & Tiger Tail(1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Collected Poems(2002)Description / Buy at Amazon
Tales of Desire(2010)Description / Buy at Amazon
Caterpillar Dogs(2023)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Collection of Plays

Candles to the Sun(1936)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Magic Tower(1936)Description / Buy at Amazon
Fugitive Kind(1937)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Palooka(1937)Description / Buy at Amazon
Spring Storm(1937)Description / Buy at Amazon
Battle of Angels(1940)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Glass Menagerie(1945)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Streetcar Named Desire(1947)Description / Buy at Amazon
Summer and Smoke(1948)Description / Buy at Amazon
Camino Real(1948)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Rose Tattoo(1951)Description / Buy at Amazon
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof(1955)Description / Buy at Amazon
Baby Doll(1956)Description / Buy at Amazon
Orpheus Descending(1957)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Perfect Analysis Given By a Parrot.(1958)Description / Buy at Amazon
Suddenly Last Summer(1958)Description / Buy at Amazon
Sweet Bird of Youth(1959)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Night of the Iguana(1961)Description / Buy at Amazon
Period of Adjustment(1961)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore(1963)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale(1964)Description / Buy at Amazon
Kingdom of Earth(1968)Description / Buy at Amazon
Small Craft Warnings(1972)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Red Devil Battery Sign(1975)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, volume 5(1976)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Two-Character Play(1979)Description / Buy at Amazon
Vieux Carré(1979)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur(1979)Description / Buy at Amazon
Clothes for a Summer Hotel(1981)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Long Goodbye(1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
Something Cloudy, Something Clear(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
Not About Nightingales(1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
Stairs to the Roof(2000)Description / Buy at Amazon
Gentlemen Callers(2005)Description / Buy at Amazon
Summer At the Lake(2020)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Fat Man's Wife(2020)Description / Buy at Amazon
Adam and Eve on a Ferry(2020)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Memoirs(1975)Description / Buy at Amazon
Tennessee Williams' Letters To Donald Windham, 1940 1965(1976)Description / Buy at Amazon
Five O'Clock Angel(1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: 1920-1945(2000)Description / Buy at Amazon
Notebooks(2007)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Short Story Anthologies

San Francisco Stories (By: John Miller)(1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
Los Angeles Stories (By: John Miller)(1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
On Suicide: Great Writers on the Ultimate Question (By: William Shakespeare,Virginia Woolf,Ambrose Bierce,Leo Tolstoy,Graham Greene,Langston Hughes,Emily Dickinson,John Donne,Plato,Jorge Luis Borges,Gustave Flaubert,Robert Coles,Walker Percy,Albert Camus,Cynthia Ozick,William Styron,Dorothy Parker,Sylvia Plath,Primo Levi,Phillip Lopate,John Miller,Genevieve Anderson,Alfred Alvarez,Émile Durkheim,Howard I. Kushner)(1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
New Orleans Stories (By: John Miller,Genevieve Anderson)(1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
Chicago Stories (By: Stuart Dybek,John Miller)(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
Southwest Stories (By: D.H. Lawrence,Alison Moore,Barry Gifford,Sandra Cisneros,Larry McMurtry,Sam Shepard,Leslie Marmon Silko,C.G. Jung,John Miller,Georgia O'Keefe)(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
Florida Stories (With: Dave Barry,Elmore Leonard,Ernest Hemingway,John D. MacDonald,Damon Runyon,Isaac Bashevis Singer,Nathaniel Hawthorne,Stephen Crane,Zora Neale Hurston,Elizabeth Bishop,Alison Lurie,Wallace Stevens,John Sayles,John James Audubon,Joy Williams,Joan Didion,John Miller,KirstenMiller,William Bartram)(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
Lust: Lascivious Love Stories and Passionate Poems (By: John Miller,KirstenMiller)(1994)Description / Buy at Amazon
Alaska Stories (By: John Miller,KirstenMiller)(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
Texas Stories (By: John Miller,KirstenMiller)(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
San Francisco Thrillers (By: Tim Smith,John Miller)(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
Cape Cod Stories (By: Tim Smith,John Miller)(2002)Description / Buy at Amazon
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OOB: Anthology series. The author will have written at least one story in this series.

Publication Order of William Inge's Plays

Come Back, Little Sheba (By: William Inge)(1950)Description / Buy at Amazon
Picnic (By: William Inge)(1953)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Loss of Roses (By: William Inge)(1960)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs (With: William Inge)(1960)Description / Buy at Amazon
Natural Affection (By: William Inge)(1963)Description / Buy at Amazon
4 Plays by William Inge: Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, the Dark at the Top of the Stairs (By: William Inge)(1964)Description / Buy at Amazon
Where's Daddy? (By: William Inge)(1966)Description / Buy at Amazon
Summer Brave - Acting Edition (By: William Inge)(1979)Description / Buy at Amazon
Splendor in the Grass, The Play (By: William Inge)(1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Apartment Complex: Seven One-Act Plays (By: William Inge)(2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
Somewhere in America: Six One-Act Plays (By: William Inge,Craig Pospisil)(2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
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Publication Order of Anthologies

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Tennessee Williams was an American author generally regarded one of the best playwrights ever to come out of the United States. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, he was one of the most prolific playwrights penning several award-winning plays, the most popular of which was “The Glass Menagerie”. His work is known for its dramatic flair, poetic language, heartbreaking themes, and gritty characters that have made them timeless American classics. Tennessee was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in March 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, to straight-laced minister’s daughter Edwina Dakin Williams, and a traveling salesman Cornelius Coffin Williams. In 1918, the family moved to Louis, Missouri where Cornelius has found a job as the manager of the international Shoe Company in St. Louis. His parents were constantly fighting due his father’s violent temper and drinking. Things were even worse for the young Tennessee, who because of a serious bout of diphtheria became less robust than his father wished, resulting in a bad case father son resentment. Nonetheless, his mother was overly protective of him and showered him with love and attention. This period of his life was very important to the young author who used the troubles in his life as inspiration for his later writings. Shy and small, Tom was the victim of merciless cruelty and abuse at the Eugene Field Elementary School. Struggling to cope, he was sent to Mississippi to live with his grandparents for a year. When he came back, his mother got him a typewriter and by 1924, he got his first ever article “Isolated” published by his high school paper the Ben Blewett Junior High newspaper.

It was at University City High School where Tennessee’s writing started gaining a lot of traction as he wrote a series or highly popular short story collections and published two articles in major national newspapers. He would enroll at the University of Missouri journalism department in 1929 where he got an honorable mention in the Dramatic Arts Contest for “Beauty is the Word”, one of his earliest known plays. His father forced him to quit university in 1932 to take up a job at the shoe factory, though this never stopped the determined Tom from writing. By 1937, he had staged several plays in St. , before he enrolled at the drama department in the University of Iowa graduating in 1938 with an English degree. His name Tennessee Williams came about when being underage he had to submit his plays under a false date of birth and name. Despite lying on his application, he won the $100 prize on offer and from that time became professionally known as Tennessee Williams. It was during this time that he discovered traveling and also acknowledged that he was homosexual after having far too many of his relationships end in loneliness and sadness. The search for love became one of the major themes of his works from 1940, even as he wrote while for the most part working numerous odd jobs, in debt and broke.

Tennessee got his first major break when his play “The Glass Menagerie”, which was inspired by the characters and themes of his troubled family, became an instant hit with audiences. Opening to rave reviews in Chicago, it was soon moved to Broadway where it became an even bigger hit, setting Tennessee on the path to a successful career. The play is the story of a young man’s family whose mother tries to make a match between his disabled sister and a gentleman caller. His troubled life experiences and familial relations inspire everything in Tennessee Williams’s plays. His first play “The Glass Menagerie” received much critical acclaim that it won the best play of the season by the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. His next play “A Streetcar Named Desire” that he produced in 1947 to rave reviews would establish his name among the greats in American literature history. The play went on to win the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and together with his other play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” were made into highly acclaimed films by Elia Kazan and Richard Brooks respectively. Several of his plays that referenced his struggles with alcoholism including his first play “The Glass Menagerie” were also made into motion pictures.

“The Glass Menagerie” is a play focusing on a family very similar to that of Tennessee Williams. Honing in on human emotions that influence the interaction between family members, it is set in St Louis during the interwar period. Amanda has found it difficult to bring up her two children after their father upped and left the family several years past. The abandonment by their father has had a profound impact on the family, which to an ordinary outsider would be the epitome of dysfunctional. Amanda tries her best to ensure that her children become the best they can be, but given that they are now adults, she has little if any authority to control their behavior. Both of the children had quit night school and Amanda’s hope of Tom becoming a business man or Laura becoming a typist have long since faded. Nonetheless, she still thinks highly of her children and glosses over their faults, which increasingly increases the odds that Tom may just become a mirror image of his father.

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is the Pulitzer Award-winning novel by Tennessee Williams that focuses on the themes of failure, love, and familial relationships. Stella Kowalski is very much in love with her husband Stanley Kowalski a war veteran, and would do anything to please him. Their life is complicated when Blanche Dubois Stella’s sister takes a streetcar named “Desire” and comes to spend her summer holidays in the Kowalski’s one bed-roomed apartment. Blanche is very different from her submissive sister being highly sexualized, which heightens the tension between her and her sister’s husband. Stanley can see beyond Blanche’s gaudy jewelry and clothes and with only a sheet separating their beds the tension rises in the sweltering heat of the summer. Stanley soon discovers Blanche’s tawdry past but Stella stands by her sister even as she is still loyal to a fault to her husband. The incredible loyalty that Stella has to both parties is what makes for an explosive conclusion that will shock almost every reader of the play.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Tennessee Williams

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