Reading of “Stella for Star”: an adaptation of the first award-winning story by the young Tom Williams

Presented by resident scholar Tom Mitchell

Adapted by Joi Hoffsommer and Christine Sevec-Johnson, performed with scripts in hand. “Stella for Star” is a short story about the woman Jonathan Swift named “Stella.” Swift was the 18th century English satirist who wrote Gulliver’s Travels and played an influential role in politics of his time. Stella was influential as well, and the story deals with the way in which she haunted Swift’s thoughts and memories. It is an early example of Tennessee Williams’s fascination with intriguing female characters. He received first place from the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, a prize awarded by Josephine Johnson: another significant female. At the time of Williams’s award, Johnson, from Kirksville and a student at Washington University, had just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction – the youngest recipient in the prize’s history.