Tennessee Williams's early radio sketch The Strangers published in Strand Magazine

NEW YORK — Tennessee Williams' early radio sketch The Strangers is published this week in The Strand Magazine, offering a rare glimpse into the young writer's formative experiments in audio drama. Written when he was a student at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, Williams used the name Tom Williams at the time. The Strand's publication places the piece among other little-known works by major writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck that the magazine has featured in its pages.

Set in a columned New England manor perched above the Atlantic, The Strangers centers on Mr. Brighton and Mrs. Brighton as a haunted household. The title refers to invisible demons that haunt the couple; they speak of senses beyond the ordinary five, suggesting that the Strangers exist just outside the couple's limited contact with reality. The passage also shows Williams exploring themes that would reappear in later work — isolation, the blurring of imagination and reality, and the way memory can haunt a house.

The piece emerged from Williams's time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop era, when radio dramas were a popular and practical outlet for young writers. Williams, who would later become famous for plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, was already writing radio pieces as a means to earn money and to hone the arts of plotting and dialogue. In the late 1930s, radio horror stories drew broad audiences, and Williams joined a cohort of future renowned dramatists who cut their teeth in the medium. Williams's sister Rose, whose fragile mental health would later inspire the character of Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, loomed large in the backstory that scholars cite when tracing the author's ongoing interest in madness, perception and the distance between imagination and reality.

Scholars note that Williams's early radio work was influenced not only by personal circumstance but by the broader professional ecosystem of the era. The Strand and other magazines published radio-era material as a form of experimentation and income, with figures such as Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller among later playwrights who began in radio. Williams's early sketches—The Strangers among them—are now considered part of the arc that led to his later stage triumphs, as he consistently explored themes of isolation, the shading of memory, and the unsettling spaces where perception falters.

Viewing The Strangers in this context, Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli described the piece as synthesizing stormy weather, a creaking house perched over the sea, flickering candles, and spectral figures — elements that would become familiar in Williams's later work, even as they were framed within a radio format meant to be broadcast rather than staged. The title itself evokes the idea of unseen presences that challenge the bounds of ordinary experience, a concept that Williams would expand upon in a career defined by the tension between what is seen and what is felt, between memory and reality. The Strand's publication also nods to Williams's broader literary lineage, which includes the more famous invocation of kindness by strangers in the later drama A Streetcar Named Desire, and situates The Strangers as an early exploration of the same human impulses that would drive his most enduring characters.

Scholars such as John Bak have noted that Williams’s early Iowa years produced a small but telling body of radio drama, shaped by both commercial considerations and intimate forces. The Strangers is thus not only a historical curiosity but a hinge moment that helps explain why Williams consistently returned to the questions of perception, perception’s limits, and the ways people respond to those who seem to see things others do not. In Williams's later, more famous work, those questions would be dramatized with greater scale and intensity, but the seed images are visible in this early radio piece, published decades before his name would become synonymous with American theater.