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Popular Culture Review
The Influence of Tennessee Williams:
Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights
Edited by Philip C. Kolin
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008
“Tennessee Williams deserves the honor of being recognized as one of the
most prolific and influential playwrights America has ever produced” (1). So
writes Philip C. Kolin in the preface to his edited collection, The Influence o f
Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights. Kolin goes on to
state that Williams’s “characters, symbols, poetic dramaturgy and language, and
plots have often been the models by which other playwrights are measured and
or appreciated. Every dramatist in the American theatre has been touched by his
presence” (1). To Kolin’s surprise, however, no significant, in-depth, academic
study of Williams’s wide-ranging influence on other national playwrights has
been produced. As such, he intends The Influence o f Tennessee Williams to be
the “first book to consistently and exclusively investigate the powerful ways he
entered the works of fifteen diverse yet representative American playwrights,
both his contemporaries and those dramatists who have survived him by almost
three decades” (1). Furthermore, the pieces in the volume “reassess Williams’s
importance while providing new contexts in which to read the works of [the]
other dramatists” he is studied with (1). The playwrights chosen for attention in
this context “are not the only major ones Tennessee Williams influenced. But
they do represent a valid cross-section of major female and male, white and
black, straight and gay, traditional and experimental, prizewinning dramatists
whose work, like Williams’s, has left or is leaving a legacy of greatness to the
American theatre” (1). Kolin points out shortly thereafter that, not “limited to
searching for allusions or finding ways in which Williams [s/c] plots were
borrowed, expanded, or truncated, the essays in The Influence o f Tennessee
Williams as a whole illustrate the varied, subtle, complex, and provocative ways
Williams relates to these playwrights and they to him” (2). It can be said at the
outset that this collection is a welcome, original, and much-needed addition to
American theatre criticism in general and Williams’s criticism in particular.
In the “Introduction: The Panoptic Tennessee Williams,” Kolin briefly
sketches the kind of playwright and person Williams was: highly
autobiographical, in the case of the former; an attention-loving, manic
depressive, homosexual with a penchant for alcohol and drugs, in the case of the
latter. Kolin also touches on Williams’s success as a playwright, in particular
with such now well-known works as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named
Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof but also as a prolific short story writer (more
than 100 of his stories appeared in print during his lifetime and many more
unpublished stories may well come to light at some point in the future), and just
as prolific a writer of notebooks, memoirs, letters, and essays. Williams’s