Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Early Williams
- 2 Entering The Glass Menagerie
- 3 A streetcar running fifty years
- 4 Camino Real
- 5 Writing in “A place of stone”
- 6 Before the Fall -and after
- 7 The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth
- 8 Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories
- 9 Creative rewriting
- 10 Seeking direction
- 11 Hollywood in crisis
- 12 Tennessee Williams
- 13 Words on Williams
- 14 The Strangest Kind of Romance
- Selected bibliography
- Index
14 - The Strangest Kind of Romance
Tennessee Williams and his Broadway critics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Early Williams
- 2 Entering The Glass Menagerie
- 3 A streetcar running fifty years
- 4 Camino Real
- 5 Writing in “A place of stone”
- 6 Before the Fall -and after
- 7 The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth
- 8 Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories
- 9 Creative rewriting
- 10 Seeking direction
- 11 Hollywood in crisis
- 12 Tennessee Williams
- 13 Words on Williams
- 14 The Strangest Kind of Romance
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
Tennessee Williams's reputation as one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century seems secure. Now just over a dozen years after his death, his plays are frequently revived, he continues to provoke critical inquiry, and he is one of the few American dramatists still taught in undergraduate literature surveys. Considering his prolific output, however, he is renowned for only a handful of plays, all dating from the first fifteen years of a forty-year professional career. Indeed, one might surmise that Tennessee Williams's critical reputation during his life soared, then plummeted, and that his later works were produced and tolerated only because of the early masterpieces; moreover, that his stature is entirely dependent upon a few well-wrought dramas: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana. It is no coincidence that these plays enjoyed long, successful New York runs, for critical acclaim and commercial appeal usually coexisted on the Broadway of Williams's time.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams , pp. 255 - 264Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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