The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin

Four decades of correspondence of Tennessee Williams’s and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship.

In December 1942, two guests at a Lincoln Kirstein mixer bonded over their shared love of Hart Crane’s poetry. Thomas Lanier Williams, who had just started to go by Tennessee, was a young playwright literally making a name for himself. James Laughlin had all of six years of publishing experience under his belt as the founder of New Directions. The deep friendship struck that evening would last for forty-one years, through critical acclaim and rejection, commercial success and failure, manic highs, bouts of depression, and serious and not-so-serious liaisons.

Williams called Laughlin his literary conscience, and New Directions serves to this day as Williams’s publisher, not only for The Glass Menagerie and his other plays but also for his highly acclaimed novels, short stories, and poetry. Their letters provide a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century and reveal the struggles of a great artist, supported by the publisher he considered his one true friend.