Lost Story by Tennessee Williams Published

Fans of Tennessee Williams have a new piece of fiction to savor, reports the BBC. A US literary journal called the Strand has published a long-lost short story from the author of A Streetcar Named Desire called Crazy Night. It features a student named Anna Jean, an apparent reference to Anna Jean O'Donnell, with whom Williams had a brief fling while at the University of Missouri. The journal's managing editor thinks Williams wrote it in the 1930s while still a young man.

"The funny thing is that Williams in his notebooks and memoirs went into a lot of detail about his love affairs, but with Anna Jean he made only a passing mention," Andrew Gulli tells the AP. "Could this be the missing piece of the puzzle?" Gulli found the story in the literary archives at the University of Texas at Austin. The AP's Hillel Italie writes that the story's language is "sensual and romantic, with the kind of dramatic turns of phrase that Blanche DuBois might have used, whether referring to a 'black cloud of incipient terror' in the narrator's mind or savoring the night air that 'came in cool and sweet, faintly scented with a flowering vine.'" The full Williams story is at the Strand, but it will cost you $10. (More Tennessee Williams stories.)