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In his epilogue Bill Smith describes his encounter when "my friend the eminent pulmonologist Dr. Marvin Sackner found that the hospital had misread" an x-ray and was responsible for a pulmonary diagnosis that saved Smith from unnecessary lung surgery. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Deborah Rothschild, editor and curator, contributes an introductory essay for the catalogue and an acknowledgement in which she writes that "William Jay Smith knew the Murphys firsthand, and they also singledout his talent, prophesizing a distinguished career in arts and letters." Smith writes an essay titled "Gerald Murphy - cubist Painter, Concrete Poet" in which he describes his typewriter poems and how Gerald Murphy purchased copies of "Typewriter Birds" in excahnge for a Mark Cross attache case. In this essay, Smith also describes the genre of typewriter poetry and how he started to create them and how he felt that he "had instinctively reached back and cut through to something primitive and unspoiled. The fact that my triumph had begun as a humorous gesture made it no less serious. I had touched something, I felt, at the depth of the psyche, at that still center where creation makes its mysterious way." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Amazon.com: Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was one of the most acclaimed, popular, and controversial American playwrights of the twentieth century. The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are all considered classics of modern theatre, and their characters and situations are iconic representations of the postwar South.In his early years, Williams concentrated his literary talents just as intently on poetry as on plays. Watching over him during this critical learning period was his close friend William Jay Smith (b. 1918), who met Williams in St. Louis as both were embarking on careers as writers. Smith would go on to publish thirteen collections of poetry and an epic sequence of poems describing the forced removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. Both Smith and Williams were affected profoundly by memories of childhood and adolescence in Louisiana and Mississippi, and those experiences shaped their subsequent, mature work once they moved out...