Thomas Lanier Williams was an American playwright, poet, and novelist. Some of his most famous plays include The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The Glass Menagerie tells the story of Amanda Wingfield and her children Laura and Tom set in St. Louis in the late 1930s. Amanda yearns to find a husband for her shy daughter Laura while Tom works to support the family. A Streetcar Named Desire follows Blanche DuBois who arrives in New Orleans to live with her sister Stella and her brutish brother-in-law Stanley. Williams won two Pulitzer Prizes and a Tony Award for

1. *Name: Thomas Lanier
Williams(1911-1983)
*Playwright, Poet and Novelist
*He graduated from the
university of Iowa in 1940.
He wrote what would be his first
major theatrical success, ‘’The
Glass Menagerie’’.
He won a tony Award for ‘’The
rose tattoo’’ and two Pulitzer
awards for ‘’A street car Named
Desire’’ and ‘’Cat on a hot tin roof’’

2. The Glass Menagerie
>1944<
• Amanda's husband abandoned the family •The play was introduced to the
long ago. Although a survivor and a
pragmatist, Amanda yearns for the audience by Tom as a memory
illusions and comforts she remembers play, based on his recollection of
from her days as a fêted Southern belle. his mother Amanda and his sister
She yearns especially for these things for Laura.
her daughter Laura, a young adult with a
crippled foot and tremulous insecurity •The subjects and themes of the
about the outside world. Tom works in a play are weighty and somewhat
warehouse, doing his best to support timeless: failures of the family
them. He chafes under the banality and structure, failures of fathers
boredom of everyday life and spends
much of his spare time watching movies (perhaps even God), broken
in cheap cinemas at all hours of the night. promises, individual failure and
Amanda is obsessed with finding a suitor reconciliation. The Glass
for Laura, who spends most of her time Menagerie is about tough
with her collection of little glass animals.
Eventually Tom brings home an decisions people make for
acquaintance from work named Jim, who themselves that affect others and
Amanda hopes will be the long-awaited adversely themselves.
suitor for Laura.
The play premiered in Chicago in 1944. It was championed by Chicago critics Ashton
Stevens and Claudia Cassidy whose enthusiasm helped build audiences so the producers could
move the play to Broadway where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1945.

3. A Streetcar named Desire
• The play presents Blanche DuBois, a fading but still-
attractive Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue
and culture only thinly mask alcoholism and
delusions of grandeur. Her poise is an illusion she
presents to shield others (but most of all, herself)
>1947<
from her reality, and an attempt to make herself still
attractive to new male suitors. Blanche arrives at the
apartment of her sister Stella Kowalski in the French
Quarter of New Orleans, on Elysian Fields Avenue;
the local transportation she takes to arrive there
includes a streetcar route named "Desire." The
steamy, urban ambiance is a shock to Blanche's
nerves. Blanche is welcomed with some trepidation
by Stella, who fears the reaction of her husband
Stanley. As Blanche explains that their ancestral
southern plantation, Belle Reve in Laurel,
Mississippi, has been "lost" due to the "epic
fornications" of their ancestors, her veneer of self-
possession begins to slip drastically. Here "epic
fornications" may be interpreted as the debauchery
of her ancestors which in turn caused them financial
losses.

4. And Happy Halloween