Williams, Tennessee

Inscribed first edition, first printing of Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical memory play, his first stage success.

• Tennessee Williams (American).
• New York: Random House, 1945.
• 124 pages.
• Black-and-white photographic frontispiece, with three black-and-white photographic plates of the stage production.
• Inscribed by Williams to front flyleaf “For Elizabeth Anne / McMurray / with sincere appreciation,” dated August 1945.
• Bound in original rust cloth with black spine plate and gilt lettering, and with original price-clipped color pictorial dust jacket, designed by Riki Levinson, black top-stain, fore-edge machine deckle.

Glass Menagerie was a hit on Broadway, “hailed with joy from end to end” and praised as being composed of “make-believe so real it tears your heart out” (jacket). Its success rocketed Williams into the ranks of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neil. It has received several film adaptations, the first of which starred Gertrude Lawrence and Kirk Douglas.

Based on an earlier short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie painfully echoes the events of his young adulthood. The play almost doesn’t need the “semi-” qualifier ahead of “autobiographical,” from Tom’s monotonous job at the shoe factory (Williams began writing in earnest while working at the International Shoe Company factory) to his absent father (Williams’ own father was a traveling salesman) and even to the lead character’s name (Williams’ birth name was Thomas).

This copy is inscribed to Elizabeth Anne McMurray, the proprietor of McMurray’s Bookstore in Dallas, Texas, and later a judge for the National Book Awards. A lovely and bookish association copy.