Gathering Up the ‘Pieces of [His] Youth’: A Study of Tennessee Williams’ Non-Fiction

Tennessee Williams wrote almost daily for over forty years, leaving behind him a trove of manuscripts that editors are only now beginning to discover. Previously unpublished work of his has thus appeared almost yearly in journals and in book form since the mid-1990s, attesting to the fact that Williams is enjoying a literary afterlife as fertile as the one he knew while he was still alive. My research at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) hopes to contribute to prolonging that afterlife. During my research stay at the RBML this past August, I was able to examine many of Williams’s non-fiction manuscripts, in particular those related directly or indirectly to his Memoirs, published in 197