Context
Author Biography - Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, on 26 March 1911. Williams’s childhood was not a happy one and, at the age of 14, he ‘discovered writing as an escape from the world of reality’ in which he felt ‘acutely uncomfortable’ [1]. Plagued by childhood illness and
regarded as a ‘sissy’ by his father, Williams developed an ‘excessive attachment’ to the female members of his family, and his female characters are clearly drawn from his close observations of these women.
Williams worked for a time as a clerk in a shoe factory, a period he later described as a ‘living death’. His interest in writing re-emerged when he met a group of poets; he enrolled at the University of Iowa and began to write plays.
He left home at the age of 28 and settled in New Orleans where he changed his lifestyle and his name. His new name dissociated him from early inferior work published under his real name, and had also been a college nickname, chosen because his father was from Tennessee. In 1940, Williams began working on a play called The Gentleman Caller, which evolved into The Glass Menagerie. It opened on Broadway in 1945, revolutionising American theatre. In 1947 his second masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, won him his second New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and his first Pulitzer Prize. Williams died in 1983, at the age of 71.
Background
Williams’s early plays also connected with the new American taste for realism that emerged following the Depression and World War II. The characters in A Streetcar Named Desire are trying to rebuild their lives in postwar America: Stanley and Mitch served in the military, while Blanche had affairs with young soldiers based near her home.
Streetcar hit theaters in 1946. The play cemented William's reputation as one of the greatest American playwrights, winning him a New York's Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Among the play's greatest achievements is the depiction of the psychology of working class characters. In the plays of the period, depictions of working-class life tended to be didactic, with a focus on social commentary or a kind of documentary drama. Williams' play sought to depict working-class characters as psychologically-evolved entities; to some extent, Williams tries to portray these blue-collar characters on their own terms, without romanticizing them.
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, on 26 March 1911. Williams’s childhood was not a happy one and, at the age of 14, he ‘discovered writing as an escape from the world of reality’ in which he felt ‘acutely uncomfortable’ [1]. Plagued by childhood illness and
regarded as a ‘sissy’ by his father, Williams developed an ‘excessive attachment’ to the female members of his family, and his female characters are clearly drawn from his close observations of these women.
Williams worked for a time as a clerk in a shoe factory, a period he later described as a ‘living death’. His interest in writing re-emerged when he met a group of poets; he enrolled at the University of Iowa and began to write plays.
He left home at the age of 28 and settled in New Orleans where he changed his lifestyle and his name. His new name dissociated him from early inferior work published under his real name, and had also been a college nickname, chosen because his father was from Tennessee. In 1940, Williams began working on a play called The Gentleman Caller, which evolved into The Glass Menagerie. It opened on Broadway in 1945, revolutionising American theatre. In 1947 his second masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, won him his second New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and his first Pulitzer Prize. Williams died in 1983, at the age of 71.
Background
Williams’s early plays also connected with the new American taste for realism that emerged following the Depression and World War II. The characters in A Streetcar Named Desire are trying to rebuild their lives in postwar America: Stanley and Mitch served in the military, while Blanche had affairs with young soldiers based near her home.
Streetcar hit theaters in 1946. The play cemented William's reputation as one of the greatest American playwrights, winning him a New York's Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Among the play's greatest achievements is the depiction of the psychology of working class characters. In the plays of the period, depictions of working-class life tended to be didactic, with a focus on social commentary or a kind of documentary drama. Williams' play sought to depict working-class characters as psychologically-evolved entities; to some extent, Williams tries to portray these blue-collar characters on their own terms, without romanticizing them.
Streetcar Named Desire
Novel Setting
1947, New Orleans, Louisiana, French Quarter
Synopsis
The Kowalski apartment is in a poor but charming neighborhood in the French Quarter. Stella, twenty-five years old and pregnant, lives with her blue collar husband Stanley Kowalski. It is summertime, and the heat is oppressive. Blanche Dubois, Stella's older sister, arrives unexpectedly, carrying all that she owns.
1947, New Orleans, Louisiana, French Quarter
Synopsis
The Kowalski apartment is in a poor but charming neighborhood in the French Quarter. Stella, twenty-five years old and pregnant, lives with her blue collar husband Stanley Kowalski. It is summertime, and the heat is oppressive. Blanche Dubois, Stella's older sister, arrives unexpectedly, carrying all that she owns.
