“darling” Pru: Four Unpublished Tennessee Williams Letters to Truman Capote

Archived at the Historic New Orleans Collection are four unpublished Tennessee Williams’s letters, written from Rome and Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to an unidentified recipient named Pru. This article includes these four letters, with the permission of the Williams Estate, and argues that Pru is actually Truman Capote (an example of Williams camping a name) based upon the people, places, times, and events mentioned in the letters. Valuable literary artifacts, these letters shed light on the circle of gay expatriate writers to which Williams and Capote belonged and give us a window into the complicated relationship Williams had with Capote. In the course of his correspondence to Pru, Williams reveals his fears about casting for the film adaptations of The Rose Tattoo and Orpheus Descending, including his candid opinions of Anna Magnani, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and others.