One Arm

Tennessee Williams's most daring short fiction, unfiltered and uncompromising. This 1967 New Directions paperback (Second Printing) collects stories Williams wrote alongside his celebrated plays, revealing the darker psychological terrain beneath Southern Gothic charm. The title story explores a one-armed male hustler whose beauty attracts and destroys, while other pieces tackle homosexuality, loneliness, and desire with frankness rare in 1940s-50s American fiction.

New Directions, the avant-garde publisher that championed Williams, Pound, and Djuna Barnes, gave Williams freedom to publish work too raw for mainstream magazines. This second printing indicates the collection's immediate impact - readers discovering that the playwright of "Streetcar" and "Glass Menagerie" wrote prose that pushed even further into psychological extremity.

Williams's short fiction operates at the intersection of Southern literary tradition and modernist experimentation, influenced equally by D.H. Lawrence's sexual frankness and Carson McCullers's grotesque tenderness. For Williams completists or students of mid-century American literature's hidden queer current, these stories expose the violent emotional life beneath genteel surfaces - the "one arm" suggesting both mutilation and the fragility of human connection.