Hard Candy: A Book of Stories is a collection of short stories by American writer Tennessee Williams, which was first published in 1954 by New Directions.^[1]

Those stories published originally in magazines before being collected in Hard Candy are indicated.^[2]

• "Three Players of a Summer Game” (The New Yorker, October 24, 1952)
• "Two on a Party”
• "The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin” (Flair, 1950)
• "Hard Candy"
• "Rubio y Morena” (Partisan Review, December 12, 1948)
• "The Mattress by the Tomato Patch”
• "The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly”
• "The Vine” (Mademoiselle, July 1954)
• "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”

The period in which Williams wrote the stories for Hard Candy were contemporaneous with the staging of A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) with his emergence as “America’s most important playwright.”^[3]

The years 1948-1952 were a “golden age” for Williams, both personally and professionally.^[4] Literary critic and biographer Gore Vidal termed 1948 Williams’ “ annus mirabilis"^[5]

Literary critic Dennis Vannatta cautions that “although this period produced a bright flowering of his short fiction, not every story written during this time is first-rate.”^[6]

In March 1954 Williams noted in a letter that he was "pulling together a short-long play based on the characters in "Three Players."^[7] The play was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The 1967 paperback edition, dedicated to Jane and Paul Bowles, notes that the title piece, "Hard Candy," is a later version of "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio," yet both stories are included, despite employing the same theme and the same setting, because the accounts are so different.^[8]