Tennessee Williams is, of course, one of the country's master dramatists. So much emphasis is placed on his plays, however, that it is easy to forget that Williams--poet, novelist, essayist--was a true man of letters. While it lacks the intensity of "Streetcar" or the heartbreaking tenderness of "The Glass Menagerie," "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" is vintage Williams just the same. Williams once said that he was interested in characters who "were frightened of life. . .who were desperate to reach out to another person." Karen Stone, a lonely, fragile woman who is desperate to "stop the drift" following the death of her husband and her own fading youth and beauty, is such a character. It will never be considered one of his masterpieces, but it will touch your heart in a way that only Williams can.

Mr. Williams has managed, yet again, to create a tragic, flawed and brave heroine who stands unique amongst his other memorable female portrayals.

Newly widowed, the over-indulged and aging socialite Mrs. Stone travels to Rome where, amongst her circle of charmed and wealthy peers, she discovers truths about her own inner life as well as the seedy underbelly of the society in which she'd til now played a prominent and sneering role.

A developing, doomed relationship with a young Italian call-boy (controlled by an equally memorable female pimp) uncovers Mrs. Stone's latent passion and lonliness, leading ultimately to a melodramatic submission to the nihilism of anonymous sex.

The depth of Mrs. Stone's passion combined with her reserved dignity represent (to me) the singular beauty and subtle power increasingly inherent in women as we grow older. A beauty and power that are still tragically devalued and discouraged by our society today, more than 30 years after this timeless prose was written.

Read this book for yourself, and for all of the women in your life.

This book made me immediately drive to the Smokies and search out the many logging camps described in great detail. Bill Hooks makes this book a "must have" for the Smoky Mountain Hiker types. The information on the ancient town of Elkmont was fantastic. I will be using this book along with my trail maps to find the many 'turn-of-the-century' archaeological spots tucked away in the National Park.

Hooks and Schmidt have written the definitive history of the Little River Railroad and Lumber Companies with Whistle Over the Mountain. Hooks has spent most of his 80 years researching the natural and human history of the Smokies. Packed with maps and vintage photos. This has become our "Bible" here at the Little River Museum in Townsend, and is a must for any railroad, logging or hiking fan. Beautifully designed and very well written.

Loved the movie and wanted to read the book version. Was disappointed when I received the book and it was the "play" version. Buyer beware.

I am a playwrite, and this is my favorite play.

Most people asssume Tennessee Willams' master opus to be 'A Streetcar Named Desire', or perhaps even 'The Glass Menagerie'.....But even these masterpieces seem overdone and overbearing when compared to this short, seemingly insignificant little play.

Here's the story: Catherine Holly, a beautiful and outspoken young woman, has been stuck in an insane asylum for the last few months. She has been put in there due to the stories, the awful, violent stories, she forces herself to tell......Stories concerning the death of her cousin, the poet and socialite Sebastian Venable.

She had been vacationing with him on that last summer of his life, and was indeed with him when she died.......But the version of Sebastian's death which she presents is too horrible for those who knew him and loved him, namely his mother, Violet Venable, to accept.

Violet wishes for her niece to stop repaeting these awful stories....She wishes for Catherine to be lobotomized. The play takes place in Violet Venable's house, where Catherine is examined by the young doctor who will decide whether or not she should be operated on or not, and thus we get to hear first hand, her hideous story of what had happened, Suddenly last Summer.

I will not spoil it further.....You simply must read this play. It tackles the subjects of Death, sexuality, mortality, and most importantly, the suffering and the shame that comes with and is the fruit of complete and utter honesty, with such skill....It is amazing, when you think of it, how underrated this play is.

This play of Williams' (originally presented with the one-act "Something Unspoken" as "Garden District") pulls together a number of themes that ran through his earlier works -- violence, sexual exploitation, cannibalism, alienation -- and combines them in a work that is both powerful visceral and hypnotically dream-like. The story concerns Catherine Holly and the strange story she has to tell about her cousin Sebastian. Her tale wreaks havoc within her family, particularly with her Aunt Violet, who places the girl in an asylum and wants her subjected to a lobotomy. However, the action of the play is negligible; where Williams places the chills are in the various stories told by all the characters, filling in a portrait of the bizarre, sinister Sebastian Venable. The effect is all the more disturbing for the fact that we see the events in our imaginations rather than onstage. An true original from an American genius.

The last words of the book, "at last there was stillness," exemplify Spoto's ability to capture the chaos of this genius's life. Although the book is somewhat fast paced and races over portions of Williamss life, it is meticulously researched and digs up every facet of Tennessee Williams. Spoto reveals the glory days of the pulitzer prize winning playwright and the nightmare of his last two decades in which he watched success wane as fastidious critics, ignorantly demanding that Williams continue to deliver plays in the vein of Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named desire, beat him literally to death. One must have emotions of steel to get through the book's later chapters, in which Williams suffers a miserable descent into drug addiction and madness. Despite Williams's wealth and fame, the man lived a terribly difficult life. From his chaotic childhood to his drugged, alcoholic and lonely end, Williams's life was perhaps his greatest drama, as Spoto reveals.

Yes, Tennesee Williams signed some of his letters as "10." That's just one of the many things you'll learn from reading Spoto's 1985 biography of this famous American playwright. More complete, thorough and sympathetic biographies have been issued since this one, but Spoto's is still worth reading. It has the virtue of concision (it runs about 400 pages, which for a crowded life like Williams had isn't long), at least. I don't argue with Spoto's view that Williams lived a largely miserable life, sank into rampant substance abuse, and hurt most of the people who cared for him. By the time he died, he couldn't get a good review for any new play he wrote. No one in the theater world liked him. It took his death for his career to start to recover, but at this point the late plays are getting better-reviewed productions, and the scope of his entire achievement (including his work in fiction and poetry) is finally being assimilated. From this distance, the only American playwright of the 20th century who might be put into the same class is O'Neill. I would vote for Williams. Anyone who reads this book will have to be willing to take Spoto's unsympathetic reading of Williams's life. At times he lectures the dead subject of the book like a prim schoolmarm (he did the same in his Hitchcock biography). The book is still a gripping portrait of one of the greatest, and saddest, literary giants America has produced. I believe the tragedy of his genius rivals Poe's.

If you want to get the feel of the end years of Tennessee Williams' life...be sure to read Bruce Smith's "Costly Performances". I know because I was Tennessee's personal assistant for about six months ending right after the main stage opening of "A House Not Meant to Stand". Some of Bruce's "facts" are clearly incorrect. He has Tennessee and I meeting in Vancouver (I am referred to as "Saskatch".) and later travelling to Sicily. Neither of us was in either place while I was in Tennessee's employ. There are other errors too but they are minor compared to the importance of the dynamics of Tennessee and the other people in his life at that time...and Bruce captures this quite well.

As Bruce points out, Tennessee was largely abandoned in his last years by the mainstream and in their place came a cast of characters all seeking to gain something from him...money, drugs, fame...but the biggest was to be seen as his savior, either professional or personal. This drama plays out in Bruce's book and to a certain extent continues to play out AS Bruce's book. Bruce accurately skewers such characters as Gary Tucker and Schuyler Wyatt, and in great detail, but also minimizes the "good guys" such as Vasilis Voglis (referred to simply as "Voglis".) and Kate Schweppe, AKA Texas Kate.

Thus, in his book, Bruce is left alone on the stage, all others having been dismissed. But as even Bruce points out, Tennessee was always pitting people against each other, encouraging their rivalry and watching as the drama played out. He encouraged both sides of this drama, both constructive and destructive. This was his life and as he grew weaker from age and from the toll of the way he lived, he maintained this ongoing drama even at the expense of his commercial life. This is what we see unfolding in Bruce's book. If you want to know what those days were like...you will find it here.

The synopsis on the back of the book sums up its contents entirely, "Dragon country is an uninhabitable land that is inhabited." Throughout the short plays, Tennessee manages to make the audience feel just like we are in 'Dragon Country' with the characters. When I read it, I got frustrated, mad, amazed, sad, etc..which is what a quality play should do. I felt the full range of emotions, even though each story only lasted ten or so pages. I highly recommend this compilation to anyone who is a fan of theatre. The southern flair that Tennessee captures so well, is even stronger in this timeless book. Read it, you won't be sorry.

I just finished re-reading this book after having read it when I was a child. It is one of William Steele's classic frontier stories. The dialog is rich, the action is fast paced, the characters are fairly well-constructed, and there is even a moral to this tale. Trapped by raiding Indians without much water in a small fort with his family and a few other frontier families, Chad's father stands up for the Logan family, a poor woman with a young son about Chad's age, and two smaller children. The woman's husband, called Traitor by the others who are sure that he is in cahoots with the Indians. The other settlers want to force the Logan family outside the fort but Chad's father, Raburn, won't allow it. At first Chad is repelled by his father's standing up for this family of a traitor, but through the book he learns that it's not fair to judge or blame someone for what another person does - even if it's that person's father. Chad learns to follow his father's advice given near the begging of the book and resolves to "think things through" before forming an opinion. Young readers might be forewarned that this book was written at a time when Indians were portrayed as enemies to the early settlers of the American wilderness. Violence and death are portrayed in the book, as well as, heroism and bravery. For older readers who read these books as youngsters, it's a very good read.

Instead of Luc Tuymans, Anton Chekhov, Vratislav Effenberger, Milton Hatoum, Andrie Platonov, Victor Pelevin, Rebecca Solnit, I found in this issue of Grand Street (no 64) contributions of David Mamet, Suzan Lori Parks, José Saramago, Tony Smith, Tennesse Williams and Pablo Neruda

Really entertaining. The book does not go in for many facts, and yet it reveal william's strenghths and weaknesses anyway. A brilliantly wicked book by a self absorbed and somewhat selfish man. Fascinating stuff!

So many people want to dislike this play because it is so well known. Colleges and High Schools are known to always to do this play. But it is a sensitive piece of work and is a great piece to preform. Laura's character is so self- conscious and fragile in contrast to her boasterous and out going ex-southern belle mother. This is also interesting because it is actually based upon Tennesse William's family situation. The Charracters are well developed, interesting and natural dialogue and the plot is very interesting.

5 Stars -- for being the worst book I ever read!

One of the classics of our time. Perhaps the most thought provoking play I have ever encountered.