Hard Candy: A Book of Stories

First edition
Author	Tennessee Williams
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	New Directions Publishing
Publication date	1954
Media type	Print (hardback)
Pages	220
OCLC	6662774

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

Sourcesedit

• Vidal, Gore. 1985. Introduction to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories. New York Review of Books, in New Directions Publishing New York. pp. xix-xxv. ISBN 0-8112-0952-0
• Williams, Tennessee. 1985. Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories. New Directions Publishing, New York. ISBN 0-8112-0952-0
• Vannatta, Dennis. 1988. Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-8057-8304-0