Williams, Tennessee - Allean Hale (essay date fall 1999)
Allean Hale (essay date fall 1999)
SOURCE: Hale, Allean. “Tennessee Williams: The Preacher's Boy.” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 1 (fall 1999): 10-20.
[In the following essay, Hale discusses autobiographical aspects of “The Preacher's Boy.”]
In the Tennessee Williams papers at the University of Texas is an early undated story called “The Preacher's Boy” by Thomas Lanier Williams. It begins: “When the preacher and his wife came to Creve Coeur, Mississippi, their son was a delicate boy of nine years. A congenital weakness of the heart … kept him from leading an active child's life. His features were spiritually beautiful, his skin transparently fine. Blue veins were visible around his throat and temples. His hair was a cloudy gold and his eyes were as introspectively still at times as blue pools in the middle of a forest and then as mobile as tongues of blue flame.”1
Clearly, Williams was describing himself,...
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