Tennessee Williams’s later life often proved mysterious to his colleagues and critics; he was infamous for being erratic, and was lambasted by critics who longed for his earlier days. His Notebooks, recently published for the first time in an annotated edition by the Yale University Press, offer insight into the playwright’s tormented inner thoughts. Simon Callow writes in The Guardian, “It was a terrible spectacle. How had the writer out of whom had poured The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, come to this? The revelation of Margaret Bradham Thornton’s stupendous, superbly annotated edition of Williams’s Notebooks is that nothing ever poured out of him. Everything, from the beginning, was squeezed out with agonizing difficulty, surrounded by intense self-doubt and constant premonitions of physical and emotional collapse.”