A Streetcar Named Desire

Description

One of Williams' best-loved plays, this emotional rollercoaster tells the tale of the iconic Blanche DuBois and her demise by Stanley Kowalski Fading southern belle Blanche Dubois depends on the kindness of strangers and is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche's fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness.

Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the episcopal clergyman. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1961), The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963; revised 1964) and Small Craft Warnings (1972).

Blanche is the Everest of modern American drama, a peak of psychological complexity and emotional range.--John Lahr In Streetcar Williams found images and rhythms that are still part of the way we think and feel and move.--Jack Kroll Lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny.--Francis Ford Coppola The introductions, by playwrights as illustrious as Williams himself, are the gem of these new editions.--Ken Furtado "In Streetcar Williams found images and rhythms that are still part of the way we think and feel and move..."