The Rose Tattoo is larger than life-a fable, a Greek tragedy, a comedy, a melodrama-it is a love letter from Tennessee Williams to anyone who has ever been in love or ever will be. Professional widow and dressmaker Serafina delle Rosa has withdrawn from the world, locking away her heart and her sixteen-year-old daughter Rosa. Then one day a man with the sexy body of her late Sicilian husband and the face of a village idiot, Mangiacavallo (Italian for "eat a horse"), stumbles into her life and clumsily unlocks Serafina's fiery anger, sense of betrayal, pride, wit, passion, and eventually her capacious love.

The original production of The Rose Tattoo won Tony Awards for best play and for the stars, Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton. Anna Magnani received the Academy Award as Best Actress for the 1955 film version.

This edition of The Rose Tattoo has an Introduction by playwright John Patrick Shanley, the author's original foreword, the one-act The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View that was the germ for the play, and an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Jack Barbera.

About the Author
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was America's most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays-The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions-we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author. John Patrick Shanley is the author of Doubt: A Parable, which won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for best play of 2005, and several screenplays, including Moonstruck, winner of the Academy Award for best original screenplay.

Reviews
"The Rose Tattoo is life-loving and affirmative." -- Time
"The Rose Tattoo is a buoyantly comic celebration of life and its inexhaustible capacity for breaking free from the past...it would be a hard heart that failed to surrender to its generous adult fairy tale vision." -- The Independent [London]
"The Rose Tattoo is singular in the Williams canon...as poetic and wistful a work as Williams ever composed." -- The New York Times



Book Information
ISBN 9780811218825
Author Tennessee Williams
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publisher New Directions Publishing Corporation
Weight(grams) 180g
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 132mm * 15mm