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GEORGE W. CRANDELL. Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Pp. i-xiii, 1673, illustrated. $195.00.
LYLE LEVERICH. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishing Inc., 1995. Pp. i-xxvi, 1-644, illustrated. $49.00.
PHILIP C. KOLIN, ed. Special Issue: Tennessee Williams. Mississippi Quarterly 48:4 (Fall 1995). Pp. 571-818, illustrated. $10.00.
Fifty years after his success with The Glass Menagerie (1944-45) and twelve years since his death in 1983, Tennessee Williams's plays are making a spectacular comeback, with major new productions for stage, television, and film on both sides of the Atlantic, and a confident new energy in academic discourse. The cause may be partly a recovery from the temporary slump that seems to follow any major artist's death, and partly, perhaps, a quirk in the Zeitgeist that has made Williams's concern for losers more relevant to the desperate nineties than it seemed during the political euphoria of the sixties or the greedy materialism of the seventies and eighties. A more immediate cause, however, was the death in 1993 of Williams's tyrannical executrix, Maria St. Just, which has freed for publication the vast and fascinating Williams archives, so that we can now begin to understand more fully the influences behind his plays and the complex course of their creation. Of the three volumes under review, the first is a major bibliography of all Williams's work in print; the second is the first volume of his authorized two-volume biography; and the third is a collection of analytic essays (the first of several such collections now under way) in which new critical perspectives are brought to bear on Williams's work in ways that are illuminating.
Tennessee Williams claimed to use his art as therapy and was a compulsive reviser. He hated to complete a work, claiming nothing was finished until he had stopped thinking about it, and would frequently alter texts even after they had been successfully produced and printed. Thus there are often major differences between editions of his work, and it is to clarify this situation that George Crandell's substantial new bibliography addresses itself. Developing a database begun by Williams's bookseller friend Andreas Brown, Crandell aims to provide a detailed bibliographic description of all Williams's work that has...