“Had Tennessee Williams never written a play, he might still have entered the U.S. literary canon as a short story writer. This collection of his early short stories, brilliantly edited and annotated by Tom Mitchell, experiments with many of the themes, images, symbols, and even characters that populate Williams’s later work, both his fiction and his theatre. Early Stories is an important contribution to the already vast Williams oeuvre.”—John S. Bak, author, Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life

“Reading Tennessee Williams’s early fiction and poetry, guided by pioneering Williams scholar Tom Mitchell, we view the dawn of America’s great playwright. Sigmund Freud suggested that what we don’t talk about is what’s most important. Tennessee Williams talked a lot about his time in Mississippi and in New Orleans. He didn’t say as much about the Midwest, where Williams lived from the time he was seven until he was twenty-nine. This wonder-filled anthology does the talking for him.”—David Kaplan, curator, the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival

“It is from these succulent acorns that the towering art of Tennessee Williams grew. He gathers together passions, sexual repressions, cruel mores, and untarnished ambitions in these eager stories, which sparkle on their own as well as point toward the soaring work to follow.”—Jewelle Gomez, author, The Gilda Stories

“Tom Mitchell’s collection of Tennessee Williams’s short stories from the 1930s, written before Williams had become one of America’s most lauded playwrights, provides invaluable insight into the world of a thoughtful outsider who would go on to become the champion of the ‘fugitive kind,’ crafting portraits of truth spoken from the margins of society. Providing glimpses of the influences that shaped Williams’s sensibility and that created some of the most famous characters in the American theatre, Early Stories by Tennessee Williams is a must-read for anyone interested in his life and work.”—Annette J. Saddik, author, Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer 

“These early stories have something that the later, more finished works lack: a rawness and a youthfulness in craft. It’s like looking at a pencil sketch a painter makes before adding the oil paints. But it is precisely that quality that makes these stories so powerful. You can see the innate talent of the storyteller, the search for his own form of eloquence. I love them.”—Moisés Kaufman, playwright/author, Gross Indecency, The Laramie Project, Here There Are Blueberries

Stories included in collection

Middle West 
Apt. F, 3rd Flo. So. 
Useless 
Grenada to West Plains 
Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite (or Age of Retirement) 
God in the Free Ward 
The Spinning Song 
Jonquils 10¢ a Dozen 
The Lake Trip 
Nirvana 
Joe Clay’s Fiddle 
Souvenir for Bennie and Eva (or Beginning and End of a Story) 
Dago Hill 
Flowers 
Byron, the Campus Poet (or The Record of an Adolescent Katharsis) 
Square Pegs 
Corduroy Pants (or A Pack of Cigarettes) 
Venite Adoremus 
An Afternoon Off for Death 
Ironweed 
Season of Grapes (or Girl at the Lake) 
They Go Like a Thistle, He Said (or Blue Roses, or The Fur-Lined Coat) 
None but the Lonely Heart 
My Escape 
Ate Toadstools but Didn’t Quite Die 
Till One or the Other Gits Back 
Autumn Sunlight 
Stair to the Roof (or Episodes from the Life of a Clerk) 
The Caterpillar Dogs 
Oak Leaves 
Cold Stream