It is tempting to say that “It’s all there, the Williams cosmos” in these fifteen plays. It is and it’s not.

It can never be “all there,” of course, when talking about a writer of genius. Good plays are not that neat. But reading these plays of the very young Tennessee, then of the successful Tennessee Williams, and finally of the troubled man of the 1970s he had become, we are offered a panoramic yet detailed view of the themes, the demons, and the wit of this iconic playwright.

For example, we have an embryonic Glass Menagerie in The Pretty Trap, “a comedy in one-act,” written between 1943 and 1944. The Wingfields and the Gentleman Caller are there and so is the central event of the full-length “memory play” soon to follow. What is most striking about this version of their story (Williams reworked the story of Amanda and her two children, many times, even as a film script) is the absence of the framing device of the play—Tom’s narratives and his extraordinary language, which opens the doorway to the extraordinary language of the play and the extraordinary language of his mother and of his sister and the Gentleman Caller as well. But in this early version, Tom is the least interesting character in the quartet, easily upstaged by his own family and their visitor. Until he found Tom Wing-field’s voice, Williams seems not to have completely found his own.

There are traces of it, to be sure, in the plays written in the 1930s but for the most part the dialogue is more workmanlike than inspired. Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry (1936) is written by a young playwright who clearly knows his O’Neill. And yet, in the stage directions, there are traces of the Williams who would soon stand up and take his place apart from the other Broadway playwrights he often set out to emulate. The Moony’s kitchen is “eloquent of slovenly housekeeping” and his wife is “like a tiny mandarin, enveloped in the ruins of a once gorgeously-flowered Japanese silk kimono.” Felicities like these abound in these plays of the ’30s. Their suddenness amidst the ordinariness of the rest of the text is breathtaking. Just when you’re thinking, “When does he become Tennessee Williams?” he does precisely that—right in front of your eyes. Almost every one of the plays from this period has a moment that is gloriously prescient of the artist to come. Reading these plays you will be present at the creation of a writer.

The familiar themes of Williams’s mature plays are all to be found here: a brutal environment destroying the individual; the desire for respite from battering circumstances; the strong pull of carnality as it trumps resolution time after time; the unbearable loneliness of the individual who cannot find love in a crass, capitalistic world; the sudden moments of a little happiness and even grace that keep a person going.

Reading these plays, I was reminded how much time the young Williams, like Tom Wingfield, spent at the movies. One could write a paper on the influence of Warner Bros. crime and prison melodramas on the aspiring playwright. Fortunately, he grew out of them. The hysterical politics of Me, Vashya do not return until The Red Devil Battery Sign in 1975. The seeds for political commentary were always there but perhaps wisely Williams left the field to his peer, Arthur Miller.