Portrait of Tennessee Williams
Meet the Author

Tennessee Williams

American · 1911–1983 · Playwright

Portrait: Orlando Fernandez, World Telegram staff photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Mississippi-born playwright who wrote about fragile, proud people losing ground, most memorably in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.

2 StoryBites Editions2 Big Books
Start with The Glass Menagerie → Browse the editions

Why read Tennessee Williams?

The Glass Menagerie is a play told as memory: Tom Wingfield looks back at the cramped St. Louis apartment he shared with his mother, Amanda, and his shy sister, Laura, and at the evening a young man came to dinner as a possible suitor for Laura. A Streetcar Named Desire sends Blanche DuBois, who has lost the family estate in Mississippi, to stay with her sister Stella and Stella’s husband Stanley in New Orleans, and the clash between Blanche and Stanley drives the play to its end. Williams writes with lighting, music, and props as much as with dialogue, so read the stage directions closely. Start with the shorter, gentler Menagerie, then read Streetcar.

A life in six dates

  1. 1911Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi
  2. 1918His family moves to St. Louis
  3. 1938Graduates from the University of Iowa
  4. 1945The Glass Menagerie reaches Broadway after opening in Chicago the year before
  5. 1947A Streetcar Named Desire opens on Broadway, directed by Elia Kazan with Marlon Brando as Stanley
  6. 1948Streetcar wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
  7. 1955Cat on a Hot Tin Roof wins his second Pulitzer Prize
  8. 1983Dies in New York City

Themes across the collection

PlaysAmerican literatureIllusion and realityMemory playFamilyTragedySouthern literature

The StoryBites Editions

Context that actually matters

Rose WilliamsHis older sister suffered from mental illness and underwent a lobotomy, a loss that stayed with him all his life. Laura in The Glass Menagerie is widely read as drawn partly from her.
The fading plantation SouthBlanche’s family has lost its estate piece by piece, and her manners belong to an old Southern gentility that has no place in Stanley’s working-class New Orleans.
Depression-era St. LouisThe Glass Menagerie is set in the 1930s, and Tom’s dull warehouse job echoes Williams’s own years working for a St. Louis shoe company.

Reading the plays and snagging on the language? A Glossary of Common Shakespearean Words →