Not About Nightingales

About this book

Not About Nightingales is remarkable both as the work of an unknown twenty-seven-year-old and as a first play to carry the signature "Tennessee" Williams. The subject matter is a prison scandal which shocked the nation in the mid-thirties when convicts leading a hunger strike in prison were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. "I have never written anything since that could compete with it in violence and horror",Williams said later about the full-length play he developed in 1938. It shows us the young Williams as a political writer in Depression America; its flashes of lyricism and compelling dialogue presage the great plays Williams was later to write.