One Arm and Other Stories
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.jpeg) First edition | |
| Author | Tennessee Williams |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | New Directions Publishers |
Publication date | 1948 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 210 |
| ISBN | 978-1135114442 |
One Arm and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Tennessee Williams published by New Direction in 1948.[1]
The volume was released the same year that Williams received the Pulitzer Prize for his play A Streetcar Named Desire.[2]
The book was reprinted in 1954 with a cover by Alvin Lustig. In 1956, a Danish language translation edition was published in Copenhagen under the title Englen I Alkoven.
Those pieces originally published in magazines before being collected in this volume are indicated.[3]
- "One Arm"
- "The Malediction"
- "The Poet"
- "Chronicle of a Demise"
- "Desire and the Black Masseur"
- "Portrait of a Girl in Glass"
- "The Important Thing" (Story, November–December 1945)
- "The Angel in the Alcove"
- "The Field of Blue Children" (Story, September–October 1939)
- "The Night of the Iguana"
- "The Yellow Bird" (Town and Country, Autumn 1947)
Reception
Though granting that Tennessee Williams is "an interesting writer and a sensitive man," and that these eleven works of fiction in the collection are "electrifying," The New York Times critic James Kelly reports: "[E]ven healthy optimism is nearly invisible in the lurid studies of perversion, madness and human decay covered…"[4]
In the Saturday Review, literary critic William H. Peden wrote that Williams "is at his best" in several of the stories:[5]
Tennessee Williams is in a class by himself. Even at his worst he creates magical, terrifying, and unforgettable effects; his only limitations seem to be self-imposed.[6]
Twenty years later, in Sewanee Review, Peden stated that "The Field of Blue Children" and "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" and several other pieces from the collection were "as good as anything produced during recent years."[7]