Tennessee Williams’s first novel

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as ‘splendidly written, precise, short, complete, and fine.’ It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow recently a famous stage beauty, but now ‘drifting.’ The novel opens soon after her husband’s death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging. (‘The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.’) With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: ‘As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skillful as his play’ (
Publishers Weekly).

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 Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was America’s most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions—we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author.