Handwritten working draft in pencil by Tennessee Williams of a scene related to his play Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, 58 pages inside a 3 x 5 spiral-bound pocket notebook, circa 1946. This manuscript, totaling approximately 1,000 words, consists of dialogue among the characters "Kilroy," "Gypsy," "Esmerelda," and "Nursie," which—though they do not appear in the published versions of the play—more or less correspond to the climactic and erotically charged moments when Kilroy and Esmerelda meet for the first time, and again after her virginity is restored by the full moon.
Much of the dialogue in this early draft is between Kilroy and Esmerelda, and it opens with a preliminary meeting between Kilroy and Esmerelda in which they eat a "tongue sandwich"—a recurring theme throughout the piece. It also includes an unusual musical section in which a poem ("Moment in a Room") is sung by Esmerelda ("We have not long to love / A night, a day / The tender things are those we fold away"), followed by a section of rhyming dialogue between the two potential lovers, with violin accompaniment. In fine condition. Accompanied by a later printing of the 'acting edition' of American Blues: Five Short Plays by Tennessee Williams, published by the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., which includes 'Ten Blocks on the Camino Real.'
Camino Real, Tennessee Williams's most surreal and dream-like play, grew out of his earlier one-act play entitled Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, which was written in 1946 and first published by Dramatists Play Service in 1948. This series of ten scenes, or 'blocks,' was first staged in a workshop by Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio in 1949, then expanded by Williams in 1952 into a three-act, sixteen-scene version, foreshortening the title to Camino Real. That play made its Broadway debut in 1953, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Eli Wallach as Kilroy and Barbara Baxley as Esmeralda. Final revisions were made after Camino Real closed in New York for the version published by New Directions in October 1953.
This early, unpublished manuscript probably represents a working draft of Ten Blocks on the Camino Real from 1946, soon after Williams had finished The Glass Menagerie and was at work on A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams was inspired to write the play during a romantic, dreamy visit to Mexico in 1945, commenting on its origins in an unpublished foreword to the one-act play, penned in 1946: 'I catch a glimpse of a childishly drawn inscription, one that I have seen in a thousand different public places in the States but never before in Mexico. KILROY WAS HERE, it announces…He comes into the Sonata like hot licks on a trumpet, he and the world that he lives in, a world of pawn-shops on Rampart Street, jitney dance-halls, dollar-a-night hotel rooms, bars on Skid Row, all the vivid, one-dimensional clowneries and heroisms of the nickel comic and adventure strips, celebrated in the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum. This is Kilroy, the most famous citizen of America, about whom nothing is known except that he goes everywhere that it doesn’t cost much to go, the poor man’s Don Quixote or Paul Bunyan.'
