Unpublished Tennessee Williams short story sees the light of day after 80 years

An unpublished short story by the playwright Tennessee Williams, in which a college freshman recounts the details of a romance that reaches "the ultimate degree of intimacy" before ending, will finally be revealed to the public around 80 years after the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof author penned it.

Like the character of Blanche DuBois from his play A Streetcar Named Desire, said to have been inspired by his mother, and Laura Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie, believed to have been modelled on his sister, the story, Crazy Night, draws upon another real woman from Williams's life: this time, his college girlfriend. Thought to have been written in the 1930s, the tale is told by a college freshman, and will be published for the first time in the spring issue of the American magazine The Strand.

"It seems to have been written when Williams was rather young, probably around the 1930s," Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli told the Associated Press. "There is a theme of disappointment, the old 'mendacity theme' from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He could show how, beneath the cloak of respectability, his characters had horrible insecurities and dark secrets. Williams was a master of showing the desperation and need humans have for companionship, and was equally skilled at showing how relationships go sour and lead to cynicism."

Set around a spring-term ritual when students would drink heavily and have sex – a night which appeared "feverishly gay" but is "really the saddest night of the year" – the story describes the narrator's romance with Anna Jean. Williams dated the student Anna Jean O'Donnell while at the University of Missouri.

His narrator enjoys "the ultimate degree of intimacy" with his Anna Jean. "Both her arms were lifted toward me," wrote Williams. "I had fallen between them. And the rest of what happened between us was a blind thing, almost involuntary, drawing from us both something that seemed hardly a part of ourselves."

The story also features a scene in which male students are paired off with girls "in a very businesslike manner, almost like vaccination on the first day of school, each boy being allowed about five minutes, going in sort of white and trembling and coming out very loud and excited with a sheepish look on his face — indicating quite plainly the difference between an initial success or failure in the sexual skirmish".

Gulli suggested to the Associated Press that the story could be a "missing piece of the puzzle" about Williams' romantic life, because "the funny thing is that Williams's 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".