Hard Candy: A Book of Stories
First edition
AuthorTennessee Williams
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
PublisherNew Directions Publishing
Publication date
1954
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages220
OCLC6662774

Hard Candy: A Book of Stories is a collection of short stories by American writer Tennessee Williams, which was first published in 1954 by New Directions.[1]

Stories

Those stories published originally in magazines before being collected in Hard Candy are indicated.[2]

  • "Three Players of a Summer Game” (The New Yorker, October 24, 1952)
  • "Two on a Party”
  • "The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin” (Flair, 1950)
  • "Hard Candy"
  • "Rubio y Morena” (Partisan Review, December 12, 1948)
  • "The Mattress by the Tomato Patch”
  • "The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly”
  • "The Vine” (Mademoiselle, July 1954)
  • "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”

Critical Assessment

The period in which Williams wrote the stories for Hard Candy were contemporaneous with the staging of A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) with his emergence as “America’s most important playwright.”[3]

The years 1948-1952 were a “golden age” for Williams, both personally and professionally.[4] Literary critic and biographer Gore Vidal termed 1948 Williams’ “ annus mirabilis"[5]

Literary critic Dennis Vannatta cautions that “although this period produced a bright flowering of his short fiction, not every story written during this time is first-rate.”[6]

In March 1954 Williams noted in a letter that he was "pulling together a short-long play based on the characters in "Three Players."[7] The play was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The 1967 paperback edition, dedicated to Jane and Paul Bowles, notes that the title piece, "Hard Candy," is a later version of "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio," yet both stories are included, despite employing the same theme and the same setting, because the accounts are so different.[8]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Vannatta, 1988 p. 133: Bibliography: Primary sources
  2. ↑ Williams, 1985 pp. 571-574: Bibliographical Notes
  3. ↑ Vannatta, 1988 p. 51
  4. ↑ Vannatta, 1988 p. 51
  5. ↑ Vidal, 1985 p. xix And: p. xxv: “[T[he great period, 1945-1952, when all the ideas for the plays were either in his head as stories - or on the stage itself.”
  6. ↑ Vannatta, 1988 p. 51
  7. ↑ Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014, p. 284. ISBN 978-0-393-02124-0
  8. ↑ Williams, 1985 pp. 571-574: Bibliographical Notes: Hard Candy “is really a variation of ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio.’”

Sources


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