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Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams and the South, by Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. vu, 184 pp. $30.00; Magical Muse: Millennial Essay s on Tennessee Williams, edited by Ralph F. Voss. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. xii, 251 pp. $39.95; The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 240 pp. $32.95.

IT is "OUT OF REGRET FOR A SOUTH that no longer exists that I write of the forces that have destroyed it," Tennessee Williams explained. This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South'2 Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity. According to the authors, this paradise lost was crucial to the dramatic imagination of Williams, but above all it seems to have inspired their own.

Besides establishing Williams's intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writer's fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies. The childhood of Thomas Lanier Williams III, who was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and raised in various other Southern locations, is described as nothing less than "a southern idyll," regardless of the father's evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sister's fragile health. However, these fundamental problems erupted suddenly and violently, so the authors insist, only with the family's move north to St. Louis. Notably, it is not the innate family situation that clouds Tom's otherwise sunny childhood, but his displacement to the North. And since "southerners . . . have deep roots in their own native soil and do not...