One Arm and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Tennessee Williams published by New Direction in 1948.Williams, 1985 pp. 571-574: Bibliographical Notes

The volume was released the same year that Williams received the Pulitzer Prize for his play A Streetcar Named Desire.Vannatta, 1988 p. 131: Chronology

The book was reprinted in 1954 with a cover by Alvin Lustig. In 1956, a Danish language translation edition was published in Copenhagen under the title Englen I Alkoven.

Stories Those pieces originally published in magazines before being collected in this volume are indicated.Williams, 1985 pp. 571-574: Bibliographical Notes "One Arm" "The Malediction" "The Poet" "Chronicle of a Demise" "Desire and the Black Masseur" "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" "The Important Thing" (Story, November–December 1945) "The Angel in the Alcove" "The Field of Blue Children" (Story, September–October 1939) "The Night of the Iguana" "The Yellow Bird" (Town and Country, Autumn 1947)

Reception Though granting that Tennessee Williams is "an interesting writer and a sensitive man," and that these eleven works of fiction in the collection are "electrifying," The New York Times critic James Kelly reports: "[E]ven healthy optimism is nearly invisible in the lurid studies of perversion, madness and human decay covered…"Kelly, 1955

In the Saturday Review, literary critic William H. Peden wrote that Williams "is at his best" in several of the stories:Peden, 1955

Twenty years later, in Sewanee Review, Peden stated that "The Field of Blue Children" and "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" and several other pieces from the collection were "as good as anything produced during recent years."Peden, 1974

Theme

Literary critic Signi Falk offers this overview of the thematic elements that appear in One Arm and Other Stories:

Falk emphasizes that the stories were informed by "Williams' wandering years through sordid rooming houses, on city streets, and on obscure corners where derelicts hide."Falk, 1978 p. 25Bloom, 1987 p. 102: "The theme of punishment for an act of rejection is...expressed most explicitly in the short story 'Desire and the Black Masseur" one of the works in the collection.

Footnotes

Sources Bloom, Harold. 1987. Tennessee Williams: Modern Critical Views. Chelsea House Publishers, New York. Falk, Signi. 1978. Tennessee Williams. Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Massachusetts. Kelly, James. 1955. "One Arm and Other Stories". The New York Times, January 2, 1955.https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/williams-stories55.html Retrieved 27 November 2023. Peden, William. 1955. "Broken Apollo and Blasted Dreams". in Saturday Review, January 8, 1955, p. 11, cited in Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. P. 77, Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Massachusetts. Peden, William. 1974. "The Recent American Short Story" in Sewanee Review, Fall 1974, p, 725, cited in Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. P. 77, Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Massachusetts. Williams, Tennessee. 1985. Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories. New Directions Publishing, New York. Vannatta, Dennis. 1988. Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Massachusetts. Vidal, Gore. 1985. Introduction to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories, New Directions Publishing, New York. pp. xix-xxv. (Originally appearing in New York Review of Books, 1985)