A WRITER FINDING HIS VOICE IN ST. LOUIS: THE EARLY SHORT STORIES OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

For the first time in forty years there are new volumes of short stories by Tennessee Williams, both edited by theater director and scholar Tom Mitchell. Early Stories by Tennessee Williams from the University of Iowa Press contains twenty-nine previously unpublished tales of the Midwest where Williams lived for twenty-two years. Written between 1932 and 1940, they created a collective portrait of a young artist finding his voice in the midst of the Great Depression. Not only did Williams infuse these stories with the people, places, and events of that turbulent time in America, they reveal so much about his unquenchable drive to experiment with style, subject, dialect, voice, and point of view. As playwright and director Moisés Kaufman has said about these stories, Williams was “searching for his own form of eloquence.”  In addition to Mitchell, panelists include theater scholar Bess Rowen and editor and scholar Thomas Keith. Annette J. Saddik will moderate.

Sponsored by Helen and George Ingram.