SOURCE: Vidal, Gore. Introduction to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories, pp. xix-xxv. New York: New Directions Books, 1985.

In the following essay, Vidal considers Williams's stories as the “true memoir” of the author and underscores the role of physical desire in his short fiction.

I

Thirty-seven years ago, to the day that I am writing this note, Tennessee Williams and I celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday in Rome, except that he said that it was his thirty-fourth birthday. Years later, when confronted with the fact that he had been born in 1911 not 1914, he said, serenely, “I do not choose to count as part of my life the three years that I spent working for a shoe company.” Actually, he spent ten months not three years in the shoe company, and the reason that he had changed his birth date was to qualify for a play contest open to those twenty-five...