In spite of his undeniable stature at home and abroad, Tennessee Williams has met with slight critical approbation. If not actively contemptuous, the little magazines have been cold. The acceptance of the ephemeral press, admittedly a mixed dish, has been succeeded by querulous denial, irritability, and, more frequently, silence from literary quarters. The reasons are not far to seek.

Mr. Williams has been too successful, and success on Broadway has come to be equated with the slick masquerading of the shoddy. Granted that Eugene O’Neill, too, has had his recent Broadway successes, but we may flatter ourselves that these amount to belated recognition of a “high seriousness” wanting in Tennesse Williams. After all, O’Neill had a tragic sense and a “daemon” (now inflated into myth), while all is negation in Williams. Or so Mr. Krutch would have us believe.