The Oxford Companion to American Literature | Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams)
Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams)( 1911–83), born in Mississippi and reared there and in St. Louis, began his career as a dramatist with American Blues (1939, published 1948), one-act plays, and Battle of Angels (1940, published 1945), revised as Orpheus Descending (1957). He first achieved success with The Glass Menagerie (1944), a play of sentiment and pathos about a frustrated mother, who is a victim of fantasies, and her withdrawn daughter. It not only is his most tender story but also is rather autobiographical.
After publishing a collection of 11 one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946), he adapted, with Donald Windham, a D.H. Lawrence story as You Touched Me! (1947), and then wrote his next important play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), set in a New Orleans slum and bringing into violent contrast a neurotic woman's dreamworld and the animalistic realism of her...
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