One Arm and Other Stories

One Arm and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Tennessee Williams published by New Direction in 1948.
The volume was released the same year that Williams received the Pulitzer Prize for his play A Streetcar Named Desire.
The book was reprinted in 1954 with a cover by Alvin Lustig. In 1956, a Danish language translation edition was published in Copenhagen under the title Englen I Alkoven.

Stories

Those pieces originally published in magazines before being collected in this volume are indicated.

"One Arm"
"The Malediction"
"The Poet"
"Chronicle of a Demise"
"Desire and the Black Masseur"
"Portrait of a Girl in Glass"
"The Important Thing"
"The Angel in the Alcove"
"The Field of Blue Children"
"The Night of the Iguana"
"The Yellow Bird"

Reception

Though granting that Tennessee Williams is "an interesting writer and a sensitive man," and that these eleven works of fiction in the collection are "electrifying," The New York Times critic James Kelly reports: "ven healthy optimism is nearly invisible in the lurid studies of perversion, madness and human decay covered…"
In the Saturday Review, literary critic William H. Peden wrote that Williams "is at his best" in several of the stories:
Twenty years later, in Sewanee Review, Peden stated that "The Field of Blue Children" and "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" and several other pieces from the collection were "as good as anything produced during recent years."

Theme

Literary critic Signi Falk offers this overview of the thematic elements that appear in One Arm and Other Stories:
Falk emphasizes that the stories were informed by "Williams' wandering years through sordid rooming houses, on city streets, and on obscure corners where derelicts hide."