An unseen radio play by Tennessee Williams published in a literary magazine | Tennessee Williams

As one of the most successful playwrights of the 20th century, Tennessee Williams wrote popular works at the height of American theatre, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Years before his unparalleled triumphs on Broadway, the aspiring writer then known as Tom wrote a series of short radio plays while struggling to make his breakthrough. One is “The Outsiders,” a supernatural tale that profiles the master wordsmith Williams later became, first published this week in the literary magazine The Strand.

It’s an “important discovery,” according to scholars of Williams’ early days and upbringing in Missouri.

“The play has all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,” said Andrew Jolly, the Bulletin’s managing editor.

“A storm, strong winds, shadows, a house perched over the sea, flickering candles, mysterious steps on the stairs, spectral beings… as well as early hints of the themes and devices that Williams would return to in his most famous later works: isolation, fear, the shades of gray between fantasy and reality, a house haunted by memory and the private horror of those who inhabit it.”

The Strangers never made it to Broadway, and are believed to have only enjoyed one performance on a rural radio station in Iowa as part of a short-lived series called Little Theater of the Air in 1938.

But the screenplay’s dark themes, characters, and plot twists provide a fascinating, if limited, glimpse into the style Williams was honing his way into his big time with plays that explore repression, desire, and loneliness. He wrote it as part of his coursework at the University of Iowa, where he was studying for an undergraduate degree in English.

“It’s as unusual as a radio play,” said Tom Mitchell, a Williams biographer and expert who was not connected to Strand’s acquisition of the work from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It is important as a ‘discovery’ as much as it is one of many examples of Williams’ writings that have not yet been published.” [and] It is among a number of stories that fall into the category of strange tales, ghost stories, strange mysteries, science fiction, time travel, etc.

“It’s a fairly standard scary story, but it’s fun and scary, and even more fun when read out loud.”

The film follows an elderly couple and their spinster guest on a stormy night on the New England coast, where the rotating beam from a nearby lighthouse provides sporadic respite from the darkness and the presence of supernatural beings known as “The Outsiders.”

A series of traumatic events leaves listeners wondering whether the creatures are “the embodiment of magic, or projections of the characters’ disintegrating minds,” according to John Buck, a professor of literature at Wits and Lorraine University, who wrote an analysis of the play by Strand.

At the time he wrote it, Buck said: “Williams was still trying, unsuccessfully, to get work either in federally funded theater or in radio broadcasting, but that failure would be fortuitous, both for him and for American theatre, because Tom Williams was well on his way to becoming Tennessee Williams.

“Like many of his early experiments, The Outsiders, with its depiction of the isolation, fear, psychological ambiguity, and potential mental disintegration of its characters, does more than simply reveal a budding artist: it foreshadows many of the themes that would define Tennessee Williams’s most enduring works.”

In 2021, Jolly unveiled another previously unpublished work by Williams, his 1952 short story “The Summer Woman,” housed in the archives of Harvard University’s Houghton Library.

By then, Williams, who died in 1983 at the age of 71, had achieved success, writing the story eight years after his breakthrough play The Glass Menagerie, and about halfway between the publication of two of his biggest successes, A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.