The Rose Tattoo and Other Plays (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Williams, Tennessee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014118650X ISBN 13: 9780141186504

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2009

Synopsis

In these three exotic, steamy dramas Tennessee Williams portrays loss, faded lives and passionate love affairs.

The Rose Tattoo is set in a bustling, Sicilian-American community, where newly widowed Serafina is paralysed by grief, until she has her romantic illusions about her dead husband shattered and rediscovers her true nature as a fiery prima donna, in a life-affirming celebration of love and sex. Tennessee Williams explores a new 'wild and unrestricted' theatrical form in the colourful tropical fantasy Camino Real, while Orpheus Descending, however, takes us into the dark territory of the Deep South: the corrupt hell of a small, brutal township, where a forbidden and tragic love affair sparks horrific violence.

About this title

About the Author:

Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the episcopal clergyman. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real(1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1961), The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963; revised 1964) and Small Craft Warnings (1972). He died in 1983.

Synopsis:

Loss, faded lies and passionate love affairs ...Three exotic, steamy dramas in which Tennessee Williams takes us from a bustling Sicilian-American community and a life-affirming celebration of love and sex in "The Rose Tattoo", into a colourful tropical fantasy in "Camino Royal" and then finally into the familiar dark territory of Williams' "Deep South in Orpheus Descending": the corrupt hell of a small, brutal township, where a forbidden and tragic love affair sparks horrific violence.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 014118650X
• ISBN 13: 9780141186504
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352