Williams, Tennessee

The Glass Menagerie: A Play. New York: Random House, 1945

8vo. Publisher’s blue cloth. Original maroon dust-jacket, some light edge wear. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.

Crandell A1.1.a

In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

A presentation copy of the first edition of a work which won the author the first of four New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards. Inscribed to Paul Bigelow, one of Williams’s closest friends: “To Paul with affection / Tenn. Oct. 1945.”

Williams’s brother recalls: “In the 1940s [Bigelow] was a deliberately mysterious uncle-figure (a young uncle, since he cannot have been much older than Tennessee) to the Atlanta group, though he was not, apparently, from Atlanta…No one was quite sure where he was from…He had gone to school in England, he had lived in Greenwich Village in the twenties, he had been a reporter in Hollywood and Mexico.” (Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography, by Dakin Williams and Shepherd Mead, New York: Arbor House, 1983).

An intelligent and humorous man with a reserved, courtly manner, Bigelow shared few confidences as deep as that he had with Williams, to whom he was alternately friend, patron, advisor and nursemaid.

Copies of The Glass Menagerie with contemporary presentations are remarkably few, those with real personal import for the author even more so.