Sweet Bird of Youth

Sweet Bird of Youth

Tennessee Williams, Landford Wilson (Introduction by)
$14.95
Publication Date: October 17th, 2008
Publisher:
New Directions
ISBN:
9780811218078
Pages:
130

Description

Now with an insightful new introduction, the author's original Foreword, and the one-act play, The Enemy: Time, on which Sweet Bird of Youth was based.

Tennessee Williams knew how to tell a good tale, and this steamy, wrenching play about a faded movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, and about the lost innocence and corruption of Chance Wayne, reveals the dark side of the American dreams of youth and fame. Distinguished American playwright Lanford Wilson has written an insightful Introduction for this edition. Also included are Williams’ original Foreword to the play; the one-act play The Enemy: Time—the germ for the full-length version, published here for the first time; an essay by Tennessee Williams scholar, Colby H. Kullman; and a chronology of the author’s life.

About the Author

 Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was America’s most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions—we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author.



Lanford Wilson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright, author of the Book of Days, The Gingham dog, and more.

Praise for Sweet Bird of Youth

Knowing his subject with chilling intensity, Mr. Williams peels off layer after layer of the skin, body, and spirit of his characters and leaves their nature exposed.
— Brooks Atkinson - The New York Times

Be especially sensitive to the play as he's written it, as he saw and heard it in his imagination...this is not realism. This is a dream that keeps going wrong.
— Lanford Wilson - from his Introduction

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