About the work
The Last of My Solid Gold Watches is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams, published in 1946 in the collection 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays. It received its stage premiere in 1948 at the Laboratory Theatre in Los Angeles; Williams dedicated the play to the actor Sydney Greenstreet, whom he had in mind for the lead.
Plot
Ageing travelling shoe salesman Charlie Colton receives his younger colleague Harper in a hotel room in the Mississippi Delta for their usual poker game. As Colton reminisces wistfully about the trade's better days, attested by several gold pocket watches he won as sales awards, Harper shows only impatience. Colton finds more warmth in an old Black hotel porter he has long known than in his younger colleague.
Cultural significance
The play is regarded as one of Williams's early studies of ageing and fading relevance. Because the text includes racist slurs, some recent productions have cut them while keeping the everyday racism the play depicts intact – a balancing act meant to preserve the timeliness of its underlying conflict.