Memoirs: Tennessee Williams (Limited Edition signed by Williams)

First Limited Edition, First Printing (Doubleday & Co.,1975). One of only 400 copies, this being number 360. Signed on the limitation page by Tennessee Williams. Fine in a fine slipcase. Presents almost as new, one of the best we've seen.  Fine in publisher's original green cloth, with bright gilt cover and spine text. Slipcase fine. Internal content fine. Octavo. xix, [xx, xxi, xxii], 264, [2, blank] pages. A truly lovely copy.  

Tennessee Williams (b. 1911 - d. 1983) was one of the most renowned and influential playwrights and storytellers of the 20th century. His classic works include:  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, Camino Real, Sweet Bird of Youth, Night of the Iguana, Orpheus Descending, and The Rose Tattoo. When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence. Although Williams long self-identified as a gay man, his candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was at the time found by many to be shocking in and of itself, where the revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by The New York Times Book Review. Over time, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed. He recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight" success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays. And, of course, Memoirs is filled with Williams' amazing friends from the worlds of stage, screen, and literature as he often hilariously, sometimes fondly: Laurette Taylor, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Vivian Leigh, Carson McCullers, Anna Magnani, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, and Tallulah Bankhead to name a few.