Books: Tennessee's World

IN THE WINTER OF CITIES (117 pp.) —Tennessee Williams—New Directions ($3.50).

One account has it that Thomas Lanier Williams changed his first name to Tennessee because he wanted to disassociate from the bad stuff he had written when his name was Tom. A lot of that early work was poetry; like a lot of young men and women, he had tried to write like Edna St. Vincent Millay without knowing one end of a burning candle from the other. But even as Tennessee, and even after The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire had proved where his real talent lay,...