A feast for Williams fans--while the events are familiar, what's new is the voice. In The Luck of Friendship we get the sane Williams, so often missing from books about his drug-addled career. Idealism and seriousness permeate this book, along with the familiar humor, shrewdness, and paranoia. (The letter in which the playwright ponders whom to leave money in his will is alone worth the price of the book.) Strewn with lines poetic, dishy, shrewd, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, the pleasure of this collection comes not just from its portrayal of a unique friendship but the fact that Williams could not write a graceless or unmemorable sentence.--Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer From the Dance and Grief
A remarkable window onto a literary friendship.-- "Publishers Weekly"
A sparkling collection of forty years of letters between Tennessee Williams and the remarkable poet/publisher James Laughlin, whom Tennessee called his 'literary conscience' and his greatest and most trusted friend. Because Tennessee and Laughlin were both wildly peripatetic, their paths rarely crossed, ensuring that their bond would live in their correspondence. The Luck of Friendship shows us a rare side of Tennessee in his interactions with that rarest of individuals, James Laughlin.--John Guare, author of Six Degrees of Separation
James Laughlin was the first to publish Tennessee Williams and the only major collaborator with whom Williams did not fall out. The Luck of Friendship is testimony to their unique, intimate collaboration down the decades. Together, they put before the American public a singular body of work, one which sustained both the foremost American playwright and one of the foremost American independent publishing houses. The Luck of Friendship offers a vivacious insight into both men, an important addition to Williams scholarship.--John Lahr, author of Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
Revealing and moving.... The rivers of mutual affection, admiration, and artistry form a powerful confluence in these deeply affecting exchanges.-- "Kirkus (starred review)"
Both men are giants and these letters are gems. The audience for this exemplary collection should be legion.--Library Journal (starred review)
Reading these letters revealed a Tennessee Williams I had never known before. Certainly not in his fabulous, fantastical plays, his tortured memoirs or the Southern Gothic biographies. Instead of being a character in one of his own plays, this Tennessee is a practical and dedicated man of the theatre, an uncompromising artist and a loving and loyal friend. I have never felt closer to a fellow playwright. Tennessee, we hardly knew you!--Terrence McNally, author of Master Class
This remarkable correspondence charts the delicate course of two literary colleagues who become fast friends; two poets who held one another aloft during the triumphant and devastating vagaries of their careers; and two men who expressed themselves in prose with the ease most of us employ in merely breathing. It's an intimate peek into a deeply moving, even profound relationship.--Doug Wright, author of I Am My Own Wife and War Paint