"Mending Sails by Candlelight": A Preface to Clothes for a Summer Hotel

On 26 March 1980, Tennessee Williams premiered his final play on Broadway, Clothes for a Summer Hotel , a biodrama based loosely on the lives and final days of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. As was his tradition, Williams wrote a pre-opening piece to accompany the opening that was intended for the theater section of the New York Times . On this occasion, the Times refused to publish the essay. Williams had been battling the newspaper’s drama critics for over a decade, and the essay, embittered and oozing with self-pity, bears the wounds he had received from their repeated confrontations. Published here for the first time (the essay had been lost for over three decades), “Mending Sails by Candlelight” is a playwright’s plea for sincere criticism on his play’s own terms and not in comparison to his early great works, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Glass Menagerie (1945), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).