Limited Edition of Selected Plays SIGNED by Tennessee Williams; Franklin Library.

Condition and Terms

This book is in excellent, unused or very gently-used condition. Notably it also comes with the editor’s notes for this “signed edition.” Many others are selling this book with editors notes that go with another Franklin edition of TW’s plays.

There are no attached bookplates or embossed seals. Sharp corners, no obvious scuffs or rubs. There are little to no scratches/marks to the gilded page-edging (see photos). The only conspicuous defect we discovered is a bit of fading on the spine, presumably from sun-exposure. Please see the photographs for best description.

Please review all photos carefully before purchasing, and feel free to ask questions if the photos do not suffice. We will provide additional photos upon request.

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Returns are only allowed due to shipping damage or item not being as described. Due to USPS insurance claims procedures, partial refunds are not allowed due to shipping damage. Items damaged in shipping must be returned in the original packaging as received. The USPS requires inspection of the packaging and item damaged.

Synopsis

The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie marked a crucial turning point in American theater, and forever changed the life of its then unknown author. Williams’s elegiac master- piece brought a radical new lyricism to Broadway ― the tragedy, fragility, and tenderness of this “memory play” have made it one of America’s most powerful, timeless, and compelling plays.

Seeing The Glass Menagerie was like stumbling on a flower in a junkyard ― Williams had pushed language and character to the front of the stage as never before."

― Arthur Miller

"Delicate and perceptive, The Glass Menagerie inhabits a half-world between comedy and tragedy."

― The New York Times

A Streetcar Named Desire

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared―57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.

"In Streetcar Williams found images and rhythms that are still part of the way we think and feel and move."

― Jack Kroll, Newsweek

"Lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny."

― Francis Ford Coppola

"Blanche is the Everest of modern American drama, a peak of psychological complexity and emotional range."

― John Lahr, The New Yorker

Camino Real

In this phantasmagorical play, the Camino Real is a dead end, a police state in a vaguely Latin American country, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature―Don Quixote, Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron―inhabit a place where corruption and indifference have immobilized and nearly destroyed the human spirit. Then, into this netherworld, the archetypal Kilroy arrives―a sailor and all-American guy with “a heart as big as the head of baby.”

" Camino Real has a very small bull's eye. It's difficult to hit, but when you do, when you do - the world's a brand new place."

― John Guare

"There are people who think that Camino Real was Tennessee Williams' best play and I believe that they are right. It is a play torn out of a human soul."

― Clive Barnes, The New York Times

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father's inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat. The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year.

"Tennessee Williams never wrote a more explosive play than Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

― Howard Kissel, The Daily News

Sweet Bird of Youth

Tennessee Williams knew how to tell a good tale, and this steamy, wrenching play about a faded movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, and about the lost innocence and corruption of Chance Wayne, reveals the dark side of the American dreams of youth and fame.

"Knowing his subject with chilling intensity, Mr. Williams peels off layer after layer of the skin, body, and spirit of his characters and leaves their nature exposed."

― Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

"Be especially sensitive to the play as he's written it, as he saw and heard it in his imagination...this is not realism. This is a dream that keeps going wrong."

― Lanford Wilson

The Night of the Iguana

Williams wrote: “This is a play about love in its purest terms.” It is also Williams’s robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women’s college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (“the world’s oldest living and practicing poet”), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night.