Tennessee Williams offered a clear, complete, and accurate catalogue of the nu-
merous editions, printings, and states through which Williams's works progressed.
During the 1990s, too, scores of critical books--by David Savran, John Clum,
Anne Fleche, Thomas P. Adler, C. W. E. Bigsby, Brenda Murphy, Jacqueline O'Connor
, and others--reinvestigated the Williams canon and offered readings
that challenged the more traditional approaches. The 1990s also saw radicalized
productions of the plays, including the cross-gendered performance of A Streetcar
Named Desire titled Belle Reprieve and black and multicultural productions of
Glass Menagerie and Streetcar. Williams's influence continued to extend to other
media in the 1990s, such as André Previn's operatic version of Streetcar, with a
libretto by Philip Littell, in San Francisco in 1998 or the Simpsons's parody of
Stanley and Stella. A new journal begun in the winter of 1998, the Tennessee
Williams Annual Review, and special issues of journals devoted to Williams work
(e.g., the Fall 1995 issue of Mississippi Quarterly and the Fall 1997 issue of Loui-
siana Literature) also signaled a renewed scholarly interest in the playwright. Dur-
ing the 1990s, two vibrant Williams Festivals, one in his Delta boyhood
hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the other in his spiritual home, New
Orleans, continued to attract faithful fans and scrupulous scholars united in their
goal of understanding and appreciating the plays. The 1999 University of Ala-
bama's Symposium on English and American Literature will be devoted to Wil-
liams.

Ultimately, though, Tennessee Williams scholarship in the 1990s should be
seen as part of a long critical legacy. The last fifty years have witnessed an enor-
mous range of critical and scholarly responses to Williams and his works. Doc-
umenting this critical response, Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and
Performance provides the first scholarly, in-depth study of the state of research as
well as a history of performance of the varied Williams canon. This reference
book contains twenty-two analytical and bibliographic chapters that together
assess the playwright's reputation and individually classify, survey, and evaluate
the scholarly, critical response to key plays or groups of works. The chapters were
written by scholars of the American theatre whose credentials and academic
affiliations represent the interdisciplinary talent required to write knowledgeably
about the complex and catholic Williams.

The organization of each chapter reveals how the aims of this Williams Guide
are accomplished. Each chapter follows a structured format that divides infor-
mation into eight major areas of research, described as follows:

To know the plays is to know Tennessee Williams. Perhaps no dramatist more
intimately and more incessantly inscribed his personal life within his scripts.
Williams theatricalized and sexualized himself through his work. This introduc-
tory section, therefore, explores the relationship of the text to Williams's life.
Each chapter begins, appropriately, with comments on book-length biographies

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