A rare recording of Pulitzer prize-winning play write Tennessee Williams has just been made available to the public. The reel to reel recording has been sitting in a vault at the Key West public library for decades.
Tennessee Williams recorded a selection of poems for the library in the early 70s, when he was 59 years old. Some verse read for the Key West library-- most of it early and young-- by an old man.
No one had really listened to the reel to reel tape in years because they didn't have the technology at library--until an anonymous donor learned about the recording and paid to have it digitized.The library then turned the audio over the the Key West Literary Seminar to publish on its online audio archive. The seminar's associate director Arlo Haskell says there aren't many recordings of the famous play write reading his poetry.
"The second poem in particular is a poem that was never published and exists only in manuscript form as far as I know in the collections of his papers at Harvard and the University of Texas. The poem begins, 'the wayward flesh has made me wise, to many things I should not know", Haskell recited.
Tennessee Williams is known for such works as A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He lived in Key West off and on over the course of about 40 years, and Williams was a big supporter of his local library - making the recording specifically for its benefit.