A Web of Inspiration: The Role of Short Stories in Tennessee Williams’s Creative Process
This essay explores the role that Tennessee Williams’s corpus of short stories played in his creative process, including the intersections between the stories and other genres in which he wrote. As a young writer, Williams identified as a poet and then, at about the time he turned twenty-seven, and...
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| הוצא לאור ב: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| מחבר ראשי: | |
| פורמט: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| שפה: | Anglais |
| יצא לאור: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2026
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| גישה מקוונת: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| סיכום: | This essay explores the role that Tennessee Williams’s corpus of short stories played in his creative process, including the intersections between the stories and other genres in which he wrote. As a young writer, Williams identified as a poet and then, at about the time he turned twenty-seven, and for the rest of his professional life, he was known as a playwright. Yet, from the beginning until the end of his career, Williams wrote dozens of short stories, drafting and then setting aside far more of them than he ever published during his lifetime. His short stories not only served as topical and tonal incubators for his one-acts and full-length plays they also provided him with a reliable laboratory for impulses that would inform his dramatic writing. Although Williams rarely spoke about the specifics of his writing life, one exception was his assertion that his plays usually began as poems, one-acts, or short stories and then evolved. This essay examines the connections between specific stories and their dramatic compliments, the importance of the early, recently published, stories in this equation, Williams’s propensity to work on multiple short stories and plays at the same time. The connection between Williams’s creative process and his short stories is further investigated by looking at threads that join several of his specific themes and subjects across time and genres. |
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