Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

<p>Two of Tennessee Williams's most revered dramas in a single paperback edition for the first time.</p><p>Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, &quot;lewd vagrant&quot; Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot.</p><p>Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a &quot;short morality play,&quot; has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion.</p><p>With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman -- he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer -- this volume also offers Williams's related essay, &quot;The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps,&quot; and a chronology of the playwright's life and works.</p>