Suddenly Last Summer - Softcover

The New York Herald-Tribune writes: "This, says Mr. Williams through the most sympathetic voice among his characters, is a true story about the time and the world we live in.' He has made it seem true - or at least curiously and suspense-fully possible - by the extraordinary skill with which he has wrung detail after detail out of a young woman who has lived with horror. [Catharine Holly], as a girl who has been the sole witness to her cousin's unbelievably shocking death, is brought into a 'planned jungle' of a New Orleans garden to confront a family that is intensely interested in having her deny the lurid tale she has told. The post-dilettante's mother is, indeed, so ruthlessly eager to suppress the facts that she had the girl incarcerated in a mental institution and she is perfectly willing, once she finishes her ritualistic five o'clock frozen daiquiri, to order the performance of a frontal lobotomy. A nun stands in rigid attendance; a doctor prepares a hypodermic to force the truth; greedy relatives beg her to recant in return for solid cash. Under the assorted, and thoroughly fascinating, pressures that are brought to bear, and under the intolerable, stammering strain of reliving her own memories, she slowly, painfully, hypnotically paints a concrete and blistering portrait of loneliness ... of the sudden snapping of that spider's web that is one man's life, of ultimate panic and futile flight. The very reluctance with which the grim, hopeless narrative is unfolded binds us to it; Mr. Williams threads it out with a spare, sure, sharply vivid control of language . . . and the spell is cast. " "Startling proof of what A man can do with words ... this brief withering play is a superb achievement." -The New York Times “A haunting spell that is virtually hypnotic in its compelling power." -The New York Post

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (born March 26, 1911 – died February 25, 1983) was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs. His professional career lasted from the mid 1930s until his death in 1983, and saw the creation of many plays that are regarded as classics of the American stage. Williams adapted much of his best known work for the cinema. Williams received virtually all of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama, including a Tony Award for best play for The Rose Tattoo (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In 1980 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter and is today acknowledged as one of the most accomplished playwrights in the history of English speaking theater.