Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Williams, Tennessee - William Peden (review date 8 January 1955)
Williams, Tennessee - William Peden (review date 8 January 1955)
William Peden (review date 8 January 1955)
SOURCE: Peden, William. “Broken Apollos and Blasted Dreams.” Saturday Review 38, no. 2 (8 January 1955): 11-12.
[In the following review, Peden offers a mixed assessment of One Arm and Other Stories.]
Tennessee Williams's One Arm and Other Stories contains some stories which have greatness in them; of some of the others, however, John Randolph's irreverent comment about Henry Clay seems appropriate: how like a dead mackerel in the moonlight [are they], that shines and stinks, and stinks and shines.
Characteristic is “Desire and the Black Masseur,” the story of Anthony Burns, a little man with “an instinct for being included in things that swallowed him up” who is eventually devoured—literally, figuratively, and symbolically—by his Nemesis, a gigantic masseur. Here we are transported from the world of accustomed responses to one which is uniquely Mr. Williams's...
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Criticism
- William Peden (review date 8 January 1955)
- Luke M. Grande (essay date November 1961)
- William H. Peden (essay date summer 1964)
- Paul J. Hurley (essay date fall 1964)
- Lester A. Beaurline (essay date September 1965)
- Tom S. Reck (essay date 1971)
- Charles E. May (essay date 1980)
- Kathryn Zabelle Derounian (essay date 1983)
- Gore Vidal (essay date 1985)
- Gordon Weaver (essay date 1988)
- Francesca M. Hitchcock (essay date fall 1995)
- Robert K. Martin (essay date 1997)
- Annette J. Saddik (essay date fall 1998)
- Jürgen C. Wolter (essay date 1998)
- Allean Hale (review date fall 1999)
- Allean Hale (essay date fall 1999)
- Philip C. Kolin (essay date fall 1999)
- Michael R. Schiavi (essay date 2002)
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