Caterpillar Dogs
and Other Early Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Seven previously unpublished stories of the Great Depression by America’s poet laureate of the lost
These tales were penned by one Thomas Lanier Williams of Missouri before he became a successful playwright, and yet his voice is unmistakable.
The reliable idiosyncrasies and quiet dignity of Williams’s eccentrics are already present in his characters. Consider the diminutive octogenarian of “The Caterpillar Dogs,” who may have just met her match in a pair of laughing Pekinese that refuse to obey; the retired, small-town evangelist in “Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite,” who wears bright-colored pajamas and receives a message from God to move to St. Louis and finally, finally go to the movies again; or the distraught factory worker whose stifled artistic spirit, and just a soupçon of the macabre, propel the drama of “Stair to the Roof.”
Love’s diversions and misdirections, even autoerotic longings, are found in these delightful lagniappes: in “Season of Grapes,” the intoxicating ripeness of summer in the Ozarks acquaints one young man with his own passions, which turn into a fever dream, and the first revelation of female sexuality blooms for a college boy in “Ironweed.”Is there such a thing as innocence? Apparently in the 1930s there was, and Williams reveals it in these stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams, the Pulitzer-winning playwright and author of the collection Hard Candy, shows glimmers of his mature style in these modest sketches. Each story begins as a character portrait that may or may not develop into a plot. In "Every Friday Nite Is Kiddies Nite" the newly retired Reverend Houston finds his new idle existence idyllic and free of guilt. The title story is a snapshot of an elderly spinster's violent final day. "Season of Grapes," by contrast, tracks a sensuous summer affair and all its attendant turbulence. Its narrator, on the verge of college, wants simultaneously to be free from and comforted by the presence of the community he's leaving behind. Other entries depict the enthusiasm of first love, a young woman branded by the wagging tongues of a provincial community, and a backwoods love triangle. The closer, "Stair to the Roof," is both the most autobiographical and the most accomplished: Edward Schiller feels trapped in his dull job at the Continental Shoe Company and dreams of escape while his mother tells everyone he's a "terrible disappointment." They might be Tom and Amanda Wingfield from Williams's breakout play, The Glass Menagerie. This is a fine addition to Williams's broad oeuvre.
