Night of the Iguana (Signet D2481) - Softcover

Williams, Tennessee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451024818 ISBN 13: 9780451024817

Publisher: New American Library, 1964

Synopsis

Now published for the first time as a trade paperback with a new introduction and the short story on which it was based.

Williams wrote: “This is a play about love in its purest terms.” It is also Williams’s robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women’s college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (“the world’s oldest living and practicing poet”), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night.

This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by award-winning playwright Doug Wright, the author’s original Foreword, the short story “The Night of the Iguana” which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch.

“I’m tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent―yeah, that’s what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this...this...this angry, petulant old man.”
        ―The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana

About this title

About the Author

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is the acclaimed author of many books of letters, short stories, poems, essays, and a large collection of plays, including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana, and The Rose Tattoo.

Doug Wright is the author of I Am My Own Wife, which won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for best play of 2004, and the Obie Award-winning play Quills.

Review

“In the end he is simply a superb storyteller.”
- Don Sjoerdsma, Phoenix/Indiana University

Edition details

• Publisher: New American Library
• Publication date: 1964
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451024818
• ISBN 13: 9780451024817
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 127