Overview
Michael S. D. Hooper reverses the recent trend of regarding Tennessee
Williams as fundamentally a social writer following the discovery,
publication and/or performance of plays from both ends of his career -
the 'proletarian' apprentice years of Candles to the Sun and Not About
Nightingales and the once overlooked final period of, amongst many other
plays, The Red Devil Battery Sign. Hooper contends that recent
criticism has exaggerated the political engagement and egalitarian
credentials of a writer whose characters and situations revert to a
reactionary politics of the individual dominated by the negotiation of
sexual power. Directly, or more often indirectly, Williams' writing
expresses social disaffection before glamorising the outcast and
shelving thoughts of political change. Through detailed analysis of
canonical texts the book sheds new light on Williams' work, as well as
on the cultural and social life of mid-twentieth-century America.