Forestalled Efforts: A Review of Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life

It is difficult to place John S. Bak's Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (2013) into an understandable category of scholarship for readers; the text itself denies such classification. Bak examines Williams's biographical and literary influences, yet he fails to trace those influences in Williams's texts themselves. While Bak's scholarship on Williams's early literary life does provide a new, useful contribution to Williams studies, his attempt to span Williams's entire career is unbalanced, and, in the end, cannot deliver completely on its promises.