One Arm and Other Stories
by Tennessee Williams
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Description
Here are the eleven remarkable stories of Tennessee Williams's first volume of short fiction, originally published in 1948 and reissued as a paperbook in response to an increasingly insistent public demand. It was this book which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In "One Arm" we live through his last hours and memories with a 'rough trade" ex-prizefighter who isawaiting show more execution for murder. "The Field of Blue Children" explores some of the strange ways of the human heart in love, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in "The Glass Menagerie," while "Desire and the Black Masseur" is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. "The Yellow Bird," well known through the author's recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister's daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
A collection of short stories exhibiting Williams' genius for creating drama with memorable characters, sexual electricity and atmosphere. I am not a fan of reading plays, but the availability of performances of Williams' work to watch over and over would be reason enough for me to sustain a video service subscription of whatever sort indefinitely. These short stories, published in 1967 during Williams' long depression, are frequently brilliant, often heart-breaking, occasionally bizarre and macabre. Two of the selections, "A Girl Made of Glass'" and "The Night of the Iguana" tell stories previously dramatised. Other powerful selections include the title story, in which a former boxer turned hustler finds his inner spark, just a bit too show more late; and "Desire and the Black Masseur", one of those that takes a turn to the very very dark side. Remarkably, there is even a flash or two of humor in the final piece, "Yellow Bird", before it takes off into outright fantasy. One or two of these stories left me a bit at a loss, but after completing the entire collection, I think I will go back and reread those, as I may just possibly have missed something, given the quality and impact of the rest.
Review written in 2014 show less
Review written in 2014 show less
Williams may be known best for his drama, but his short stories are simply brilliant, and I fell in love with his writing here on a level which was far beyond that I've experienced with his drama. I picked up the collection on a whim, and quickly discovered that his characters in prose are all-together more alive and more engaging than those I've found in his drama. In these sweeping short stories, he pulls together worlds that are simple as they are vibrant, and worth falling into with nearly every page. In fact, the flattest of the stories -- for me, at least -- was the one which touched back to the characters from his Glass Menagerie. The others, one by one, pulled me in and engaged my thoughts with every move and emotion. His flare show more for simple and natural language, buffeted by believable an all-too-real characters made this a collection that I wished wouldn't end.
Absolutely recommended. show less
Absolutely recommended. show less
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Author Information
332+ Works 31,926 Members
After O'Neill, Williams is perhaps the best dramatist the United States has yet produced. Born in his grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams and his family later moved to St. Louis. There Williams endured many bad years caused by the abuse of his father and his own anguish over his introverted sister, who was later permanently show more institutionalized. Williams attended the University of Missouri, and, after time out to clerk for a shoe company and for his own mental breakdown, also attended Washington University of St. Louis and the University of Iowa, from which he graduated in 1938. Williams began to write plays in 1935. During 1943 he spent six months as a contract screenwriter for MGM but produced only one script, The Gentleman Caller. When MGM rejected it, Williams turned it into his first major success, The Glass Menagerie (1945). In this intensely autobiographical play, Williams dramatizes the story of Amanda, who dreams of restoring her lost past by finding a gentleman caller for her crippled daughter, and of Amanda's son Tom, who longs to escape from the responsibility of supporting his mother and sister. After The Glass Menagerie,Williams wrote his masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, (1947), along with a steady stream of other plays, among them such major works as Summer and Smoke(1948), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). His plays celebrate the "fugitive kind," the sensitive outcasts whose outsider status allows them to perceive the horror of the world and who often give additional witness to that horror by becoming its victims. Stephen S. Stanton has summed up Williams's "virtues and strengths" as "a genius for portraiture, particularly of women, a sensitive ear for dialogue and the rhythms of natural speech, a comic talent often manifesting itself in "black comedy,' and a genuine theatrical flair exhibited in telling stage effects attained through lighting, costume, music, and movements." After The Night of the Iguana (1961), Williams continued to write profusely---and constantly to revise his work---but it became more difficult to get productions of his plays and, if they were produced, to win critical or popular acclaim for them. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for these two and for The Glass Menagerie and The Night of the Iguana. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Original title
- One Arm and Other Stories
- Original publication date
- 1948
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, LGBTQ+
- DDC/MDS
- 813.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PZ3 .W67655 — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction in English
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 141
- Popularity
- 231,310
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.20)
- Languages
- Danish, English, French
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 4
