Hard Candy: A Book of Stories is a collection of short stories by American writer Tennessee Williams, which was first published in 1954 by New Directions.Vannatta, 1988 p. 133: Bibliography: Primary sources
Stories
Those stories published originally in magazines before being collected in Hard Candy are indicated.Williams, 1985 pp. 571-574: Bibliographical Notes
"Three Players of a Summer Game” (The New Yorker, October 24, 1952) "Two on a Party” "The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin” (Flair, 1950) "Hard Candy" "Rubio y Morena” (Partisan Review, December 12, 1948) "The Mattress by the Tomato Patch” "The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly” "The Vine” (Mademoiselle, July 1954) "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”
Critical Assessment
The period in which Williams wrote the stories for Hard Candy were contemporaneous with the staging of A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) with his emergence as “America’s most important playwright.”Vannatta, 1988 p. 51
The years 1948-1952 were a “golden age” for Williams, both personally and professionally.Vannatta, 1988 p. 51 Literary critic and biographer Gore Vidal termed 1948 Williams’ “annus mirabilis"Vidal, 1985 p. xix And: p. xxv: “[T[he great period, 1945-1952, when all the ideas for the plays were either in his head as stories - or on the stage itself.”
Literary critic Dennis Vannatta cautions that “although this period produced a bright flowering of his short fiction, not every story written during this time is first-rate.”Vannatta, 1988 p. 51
In March 1954 Williams noted in a letter that he was "pulling together a short-long play based on the characters in "Three Players."Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014, p. 284. The play was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The 1967 paperback edition, dedicated to Jane and Paul Bowles, notes that the title piece, "Hard Candy," is a later version of "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio," yet both stories are included, despite employing the same theme and the same setting, because the accounts are so different.Williams, 1985 pp. 571-574: Bibliographical Notes: Hard Candy “is really a variation of ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio.’”
Footnotes
Sources Vidal, Gore. 1985. Introduction to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories. New York Review of Books, in New Directions Publishing New York. pp. xix-xxv. 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.