Critical dissatisfaction over Tennessee Williams' plays of the seventies has been almost unanimous….

[Critics charge that] Williams repeats himself by going over and over the same territory and … that his plays, for better or worse, are autobiographical. (p. 815)

Both charges against Williams do his plays an injustice by failing to take them on their own terms. Deflection of our interest from an author's work to his life, particularly in Williams' case, too often reflects a taste for lurid sexual detail rather than for art. Further more, the artist's work relates not to the outer details of his life but to the inner world of his imagination, so to jump from an account of Williams' sexual preferences to an allegorization of his plays is to ignore an important middle step, as the publication of his Memoirs should clearly establish. Few artists of our century have been more delighted to...