The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I: 1920-1945

Winner of the Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters, Modern Language Association, 2001. When first published in 2000, Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams was hailed as "indispensable" (Choice), "a carefully researched, fully documented study," (Buffalo News) and "a model edition of a significant set of letters by one of America's leading writers" (MLA citation for the Morton N. Cohen Award). This volume will help a widening circle of the great American playwright's readers appreciate that he was also "a prodigy of the letter" (Allan Jalon, San Francisco Chronicle) and that "his letters are among the century's finest" (John Lahr, The New Yorker).

Tennessee Williams wrote to family, friends, and fellow artists with equal measures of piety, wit, and astute self-knowledge. Presented with a running commentary to separate Williams's often hilarious, but sometimes devious, counter-reality from truth, the letters form a virtual autobiography of the great American dramatist. Volume I of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: 1920-1945 includes 330 letters written to nearly seventy correspondents and chosen from a group of 900 letters collected by two leading Williams scholars: Albert J. Devlin, professor of English at the University of Missouri, and Nancy M. Tischler, Professor Emerita of English at Pennsylvania State University.