Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography by George W. Crandell, and: Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams by Lyle Leverich, and: Special Issue: Tennessee Williams. Mississippi Quarterly by Philip C. Kolin (review)

Book Reviews GEORGE W. CRANDELL. Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Pp. i-xiii, 1673 , illustrated. $t95·oo. LYLE LEVERICH. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishing Inc., 1995. Pp. i-xxvi, 1...Q44, illustrated. $49.00. PHILIP C. KOLI N, ed. Special Issue: Tennessee Williams. Mississippi Quarterly 48:4 (Fall 1995). pp.57t-818, illustrated. $10.00. Fifty years after his success.with The Glass Menagerie (1944-45) and twelve years since his death in 1983, TCJUlessee Williams's plays afe making a spectacular comeback , with major new productions for stage, television, and film on both sides of the Atlantic, and a confident new energy in academic discourse. The cause may be partly a recovery from the temporary slump that seems to follow any major artist's death, and partly, perhaps, a quirk in the zeitgeist that has made Wil1iams's concern for losers more relevant to the desperate nineties than it seemed during the political euphoria of the sixties or the greedy materialism of the seventies and eighties. A more immediate cause, however, was the death in 1993 of Williams's tyrannical executrix, Maria St. Just, which has freed for publication the vast and faScinating Williams archives, so that we can now begin to understand more fully the influences behind his plays and the complex course of their creation. Of the three volumes under review, the first is a major bibliography of all Williams's work in print; the second is the first volume of his authorized two-volume biography; and the third is a collection of analytic essays (the first of several such collections now under way) in which new critical perspectives are brought to bear on Williams's work in ways that are illuminating. Tennessee Williams claimed to use his art as therapy and was a compulsive reviser. He hated to complete a work, claiming nothing was finished until he had stopped Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 518 Book Reviews thinking about it, and would frequently alter texts even after they had been successfully produced and printed. Thus there are often major differences between editions of his work. and it is to clarify this situation that George Crandell's substantial new bibliography addresses itself. Developing a database begun by Williams's bookseller friend Andreas Brown, Crandell aims to provide a detailed bibliographic description of all Williams's work that has been published or recorded on disc, dividing his survey into nine sections, with a tenth section of notes. The divisions are as follows: "separate publications " (i.e., the publication, reprintings, and new editions of individual works), arranged in chronological, not alphabetical, sequence; publication in "collected editions "; "first appearance" of contributions by Williams to books, pamphlets, and occasional publications; "first appearance" in magazines or newspapers of interviews with Williams or articles that quote him; a slightly anomalous (though useful) list of musical settings for his works. including operas; advertising "blurbs" written by Williams for other people's books; sound recordings of him reading from his writings or being interviewed ; and translations of his works arranged alphabetically by the language of translation , a format that is presumably standard for the "Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography," to which this volume belongs. So detailed an account has never been available before, and the Crandell bibliography will be invaluable for libraries, collectors, and booksellers. Unfortunately, it will not be as useful for scholars and students of Williams (who will be daunted by the price anyway). Though the survey goes into exhaustive detail about such things as paper, type fonts, copyrights, press runs, and dust-jackets (which are handsomely reproduced, as are title and copyright pages), it only notes the presence of substantive variants in different editions of a text without specifying what those variants are, except in a few cases. It is illuminating, for instance, to learn that "2,485 sheets (of 5000) in the first printing" of A Period of Adjustment "were not bound because of potentially libellous matter" and that, for this reason, the play's locale was altered in the next printing; but a comment that Edition Five of Cat on a Hal Till Roof contains "140 substantive changes...