Description: Never produced until this year (1998), NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES (1938), portrays a shocking prison scandal in which convicts leading a hunger strike in prison were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. Williams himself later said that he had never written anything to compare with it in violence and horror. The play indelibly presages the great plays he was later to write.
Brief description:
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was America's most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays--The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions--we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author.