Rarely seen Tennessee Williams story set in post-WWII Italy
ABC News
A rarely seen Tennessee Williams short story confirms his longtime passion for Italy and reveals concerns about how Italians felt about Americans
NEW YORK -- For Tennessee Williams, Rome was a longtime love affair, “the capitol of my heart” with its skies of “stainless blue” and cathedral domes “bathed in golden light.”
At times, he worried about how Romans felt in return.
Honored worldwide as a playwright, Williams also wrote dozens of short stories. A rarely seen piece, “The Summer Woman,” set in Italy, appears this week in the fall issue of the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine.
“The Summer Woman” was written in the early 1950s and tells of an American academic, “the remarkably young head of the English department at an important Southern university,” who frequently visits Rome and hopes to reunite with an Italian lover whom he had met “on the street” and had financially supported in hopes of keeping her “off the street.”
