TWF14: What The Professor Said

Dr. Kenneth Holditch’s opening remarks at A Little Piece of Eternity Dropped Into Your Hands: “New Orleans was created by writers and visual artists, and that’s kept a lot of New Orleans alive…it was a totally different city from anything I had ever imagined. I don’t want to be the voice of doom but you better look quick because there are forces that want to change it into Columbus, Ohio…Sherwood Anderson said New Orleans was the city of imagination. Other cities may be cities of the intellect but this is the city of the imagination. I think that had a tremendous effect on Tennessee Williams.”

A friend of Williams (name unintelligible on my recording) recounted how “[Tennesseee] recalled when he came to New Oreans, when he was headed south on the bus,  he did not expect too much from the destination other than ‘salvation from the furies that had been unleashed by fate on [his] mortal self’.”

Tennessee wrote in his journal a few days after he arrived here in 1938 “here surely is the place that I was made for of any place on this funny old world.”