Hard Candy: A Book of Stories is a collection of short stories by American writer Tennessee Williams, which was first published in 1954 by New Directions.[1]
 First edition | |
| Author | Tennessee Williams |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | New Directions Publishing |
Publication date | 1954 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 220 |
| OCLC | 6662774 |
Stories
editThose stories published originally in magazines before being collected in Hard Candy are indicated.[2]
- "Three Players of a Summer Game” (The New Yorker, October 24, 1952)
- "Two on a Party”
- "The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin” (Flair, 1950)
- "Hard Candy"
- "Rubio y Morena” (Partisan Review, December 12, 1948)
- "The Mattress by the Tomato Patch”
- "The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly”
- "The Vine” (Mademoiselle, July 1954)
- "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”
Critical Assessment
editThe period in which Williams wrote the stories for Hard Candy were contemporaneous with the staging of A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) with his emergence as “America’s most important playwright.”[3]
The years 1948-1952 were a “golden age” for Williams, both personally and professionally.[4] Literary critic and biographer Gore Vidal termed 1948 Williams’ “ annus mirabilis"[5]
Literary critic Dennis Vannatta cautions that “although this period produced a bright flowering of his short fiction, not every story written during this time is first-rate.”[6]
In March 1954 Williams noted in a letter that he was "pulling together a short-long play based on the characters in "Three Players."[7] The play was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The 1967 paperback edition, dedicated to Jane and Paul Bowles, notes that the title piece, "Hard Candy," is a later version of "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio," yet both stories are included, despite employing the same theme and the same setting, because the accounts are so different.[8]
Footnotes
edit- ^ Vannatta, 1988 p. 133: Bibliography: Primary sources
- ^ Williams, 1985 pp. 571-574: Bibliographical Notes
- ^ Vannatta, 1988 p. 51
- ^ Vannatta, 1988 p. 51
- ^ Vidal, 1985 p. xix And: p. xxv: “[T[he great period, 1945-1952, when all the ideas for the plays were either in his head as stories - or on the stage itself.”
- ^ Vannatta, 1988 p. 51
- ^ Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014, p. 284. ISBN 978-0-393-02124-0
- ^ Williams, 1985 pp. 571-574: Bibliographical Notes: Hard Candy “is really a variation of ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio.’”
Sources
edit- Vidal, Gore. 1985. Introduction to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories. New York Review of Books, in New Directions Publishing New York. pp. xix-xxv. ISBN 0-8112-0952-0
- Williams, Tennessee. 1985. Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories. New Directions Publishing, New York. ISBN 0-8112-0952-0
- Vannatta, Dennis. 1988. Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-8057-8304-0