Tennessee Williams ─ A Guide to Research and Performance

The plays of Tennessee Williams are some of the greatest triumphs of the American theatre. If Williams is not the most important American playwright, he is surely one of two or three of the most celebrated, rivaled only by Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. But in a career that spanned almost five decades, he also produced two collections of poetry, two novels, four collections of stories, and scores of essays. This reference book offers a thorough review of the vast body of research on his works, along with a history of performance. The volume contains chapters devoted to particular works or clusters of works, and each is written by an expert contributor. Each chapter includes a discussion of the biographical context of the work or group of works; a survey of the bibliographic history; a summary of major critical approaches, which looks at themes, characters, symbols, and plots; a consideration of the major critical problems posed by the work; a review of chief productions and film and television versions; a concluding overview; and a bibliography of secondary sources.

PHILIP C. KOLIN is Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His many books includeConfronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (Greenwood, 1993),Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (Greenwood, 1998) andThe Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2003).