Williams, Tennessee. (1911–1983). One Arm - SIGNED. New York: New Directions Books. 1954. First Edition.
8vo. 211 pp. Black cloth in Alvin Lustig-designed dustwrapper. Signed to the title page "To Paul / Tennessee Williams" in black ink. Cloth a bit frayed at spine head where jacket slightly torn, a few small stains to inside jacket and general wear around jacket edges, else very good. First edition thus, first state (the first edition to be issued in jacket, preceded by an unjacketed 1949 edition, and with one story revised in this book). From the library of Paul McMahon, a critic, photographer and artist who worked for more than 13 years touring with Marlene Dietrich as the icon’s stage manager, announcer, dresser, secretary and escort, and later spent 25 years as an arts and entertainment reviewer and photographer with Gay Community News, Esplanade, Tommy’s Connection, The Mirror, Bay Windows and other publications.
It was this book of eleven stories which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In “One Arm” we live through his last hours and memories with a ’rough trade" ex-prizefighter who is awaiting execution for murder. “The Field of Blue Children” explores some of the strange ways of the human heart in love, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in “The Glass Menagerie,” while “Desire and the Black Masseur” is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. “The Yellow Bird,” well known through the author’s recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister’s daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology.
Williams, Tennessee. (1911–1983). One Arm - SIGNED. New York: New Directions Books. 1954. First Edition.
8vo. 211 pp. Black cloth in Alvin Lustig-designed dustwrapper. Signed to the title page "To Paul / Tennessee Williams" in black ink. Cloth a bit frayed at spine head where jacket slightly torn, a few small stains to inside jacket and general wear around jacket edges, else very good. First edition thus, first state (the first edition to be issued in jacket, preceded by an unjacketed 1949 edition, and with one story revised in this book). From the library of Paul McMahon, a critic, photographer and artist who worked for more than 13 years touring with Marlene Dietrich as the icon’s stage manager, announcer, dresser, secretary and escort, and later spent 25 years as an arts and entertainment reviewer and photographer with Gay Community News, Esplanade, Tommy’s Connection, The Mirror, Bay Windows and other publications.
It was this book of eleven stories which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In “One Arm” we live through his last hours and memories with a ’rough trade" ex-prizefighter who is awaiting execution for murder. “The Field of Blue Children” explores some of the strange ways of the human heart in love, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in “The Glass Menagerie,” while “Desire and the Black Masseur” is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. “The Yellow Bird,” well known through the author’s recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister’s daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology.