Paul Ibell's study of Tennessee Williams follows a long-established critical practice of reading the playwright's life through his creative output and, vice versa, his plays, prose and poetry over and against his life experience. Following recent critical biographies by John Lahr as well as earlier biographies such as those by Donald Spoto and Lyle Leverich, and, of course, Williams's own Memoirs,Footnote ¹ Ibell's volume does not offer a substantial addition to our understanding of Williams's profile, or his place in the American literary canon. However, it provides an eminently readable compilation of significant milestones in the author's life and explores how Williams's personal evolution, particularly with regard to how he understood his sexual identity, intersects with the key themes addressed in his writing.

The book follows a historical trajectory, beginning with coverage of Williams's childhood and family relationships, as well as his itinerant working life before he became a prominent figure in the theatre. Chapter 1 further charts his earliest forays into writing plays (Candles to the Sun, Not about Nightingales, and Battle of Angels), in addition to short fiction (‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio’ and ‘Hard Candy’), with attention given to texts that prefigure Williams's later and most successful major works. Ibell explores how Williams's empathetic approach to characters who are located on the peripheries of mainstream society and the relation between individual suffering and one's perceived “difference” from normative forms of social identity, sexual or otherwise, is sustained throughout the corpus of his writing. Chapter 2 focusses on the 1940s, with The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke receiving prominent treatment, but again alongside minor, yet complementary, works, such as the one-act Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, and the short story “Desire and the Black Masseur.” Ibell's examination of Williams's dramatic output is noteworthy for its blending of literary and performance analysis to demonstrate how Williams's choice of staging and theatrical styles informs the meaning of his plays.

Chapters 3 through 6 cover a decade each, from the 1950s through the 1980s. Ibell's study of the 1950s concentrates on Williams's novella The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, mapping its setting as well as the dynamic of its central relationship between an aging actress and an attractive young gigolo onto the playwright's own travels and sexual encounters in Italy. Further, he offers a rapid overview of significant plays from this era – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth. Williams's screenplay for the film Baby Doll is used as a case study to illustrate his mode of adapting his own work in one genre into another, the film being based on two short plays.

In chapters 4 and 5, Ibell discusses Williams's more experimental approach to playwriting in the 1960s and 1970s in plays such as The Mutilated, The Gnadiges Fraulein and The Seven Descents of Myrtle. He records the increasingly hostile critical reception of Williams's stage productions and their lack of commercial viability across these decades. How Williams responded to his changing critical and commercial fortunes, which continued to decline in the 1980s where his new writing was concerned, remains a key topic in chapter 5. At the same time, Ibell is careful to make clear that Williams continued to be recognized and rewarded for the value of his earlier works, as supported by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the number of prestigious awards he was granted.

As well as assessing how Williams's relationship with his mother informs his last play to be staged during his lifetime, Steps Must Be Gentle, which premiered in 1980, the year in which the playwright's mother died, chapter 6 ventures into a fuller discussion of some of Williams's poetry and the way in which its themes connect to his drama. As with earlier chapters, here Ibell makes abundant reference to the critical and commercial reception of Williams's writing and how it varies over the course of his career. The final chapter attempts to assess briefly the continued relevance of Williams as a playwright for contemporary audiences.

Ibell has not written a standard academic text on Williams; for example, he provides a brief select bibliography but the chapters contain no footnotes. There are a few sweeping statements that remain unevidenced, as when he asserts a connection between the nostalgic tone of Williams's plays and his popularity in England, described as a “nation with a longing for a more glorious past” (18). Ibell does not venture into theoretical considerations of the themes he explores in the works, necessary for an in-depth assessment of the psychosexual aspects of the writing, but rather he falls back on the notion that the appeal of Williams's work lies in its universality. Hence the volume would be of limited use to researchers. However, as well as being of interest to a general readership, the text might serve as a useful primer for undergraduate students of drama and literature, because it surveys not only Williams's major plays but also a wide range of his lesser-known dramas, short stories, novellas and screenplays, and poems. The illustrations, which feature throughout, are a bonus. Ibell presents his arguments in a highly accessible manner, and the easy flow of his prose renders this critical biography an enjoyable introduction to one of the most important canonical figures in American theatre history.

In contrast to Ibell's more general approach to Williams, Jacqueline O'Connor's Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams's America offers a scholarly examination of Williams's creative output. It is a detailed and meticulously researched study of Williams's writing within the context of a postwar legal framework through which sexual identity was in part configured and sexual practice policed. The opening chapter focusses on sexual identity in relation to privacy laws during the Cold War period. A Streetcar Named Desire serves as a key text for illustrating the connections among sexual and national identities and a culture of fear and paranoia that progressively informed American legislation and allowed sexual behaviours deemed subversive to be criminalized. O'Connor traces the series of revisions that Williams made to Streetcar, which, even when absent from the final text, are shown to have informed the play's response to the legal situations that governed the lives of men and women who challenged dominant stereotypes of heterosexual femininity and masculinity.

In chapter 2, O'Connor shifts to an analysis of Williams's short fiction, “Hard Candy” and “One Arm,” exploring the notion of disgust in these stories. In addition to discussing how Williams could be more explicit in his expression of homosexual activity within the private sphere of fiction compared to a public theatre space, O'Connor posits that Williams's narrative strategy aims to deflect a reader's negative judgment toward his characters’ dissident sexual behaviours; even in the face of wider social demonization of homosexuals, she suggests, in his short fiction Williams encouraged his readers to adopt a liberal stance on sexual diversity.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Orpheus Descending, as well as the latter's source text Battle of Angels, are explored in chapter 3. The discussion of Cat focusses on questions of class status, sexuality and criminality. Big Daddy's wealth and corresponding high status within the patriarchy enable him to create a safe sexual space, where, O'Connor shows, he may engage in high-risk sexual activities that otherwise might easily incur severe criminal penalties. Orpheus functions to extend the discussion into a consideration of race. The play, in which questions of legality feature quite prominently, is used to explore Williams's perspective on the debates about sexual deviance that were circulating in 1950s America, this time in relation to heterosexual identity.

The final chapter tackles how Williams presents his own sexual identity, first as a closeted gay man, and after he publicly acknowledges his homosexuality: his appearance on the David Frost show in 1970 and his Memoirs, first published in 1975, are employed to help locate his position in relation to the emerging language of gay rights in the 1970s. O'Connor addresses how Williams's increasing openness about his sexual practice impacted on the critical reception of his work. Further, the chapter explores how emerging liberal attitudes toward homosexuality inform Williams's representation of sexuality, particularly in some of his later, more challenging, theatrical productions. Here, the looser theatrical modes embraced by Williams are compared to the fissures in legal decisions as postwar laws governing sexuality began to face more challenges. A brief conclusion reiterates the main arguments of the preceding chapters.

Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams's America explores significant examples of his writing, spanning his career, within the context of critical legal studies, especially concerning issues of privacy, censorship, public morality and personal freedom; not only does this novel approach to Williams's life and work add considerably to the critical record regarding the stimuli underpinning Williams's treatment of sexuality across multiple genres of his writing, but also O'Connor's monograph provides an important contribution to LGBT studies. O'Connor makes a convincing case for the way in which Williams's representation of dissident sexualities was informed by his knowledge and opinion of the legal context within which Americans lived out their sexual lives during the pre- and post-Stonewall eras. Her thesis is based on close readings of Williams's creative writing supported by the playwright's notebooks, letters and interviews, all of which are discussed within the context of the legislative frameworks in place when Williams was writing.

O'Connor's text challenges the idea of Williams's relatively apolitical position vis-à-vis his writing compared to more overtly political writers of his generation such as Arthur Miller by demonstrating how Williams's narratives dramatize many of the situations debated in case law, even echoing the language of substantial legal rulings at times. Each chapter displays an impressive mastery of a vast array of criticism available on Williams. The readings are situated within the context of received critical views, but O'Connor uses her knowledge of the legal framework of American society in the twentieth century to extend as well as challenge available criticism. Most noteworthy is how her analysis calls into question the way in which the public/private divide is often depicted as a firm structuring principle of Williams's dramatic and fictional narratives. O'Connor offers a more nuanced picture of how Williams comprehends the causes of personal trauma and tragedy in the lives of his marginalized characters. Her explanation of how his writing intersects with twentieth-century legal discourses concerning heterosexual and homosexual practice reveals the cultural rootedness of his characters’ experiences. Though Streetcar’s Blanche, or Oliver in “One Arm,” may make poor choices that bring about unwanted and painful consequences, these individual choices are shaped by wider social norms and strictures that are concretized in law.

The complexity of O'Connor's arguments means that this book will suit primarily postgraduates and researchers in literary and theatre studies, as well as gay studies. Having said this, her style is reader-friendly, and so it could make suitable reading for the more advanced undergraduate. Certainly, those academics who focus on Williams and/or postwar American drama would benefit from familiarizing themselves with O'Connor's original assessment of the relation between American law and the depiction of sexuality in Williams's drama and prose.