This discusses events In history at the time the play was written and the focus of the play, the Glass Menagerie.

Thomas Lanier Tennessee Williams won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1945 for his memory play, The Glass Menagerie; it was his first success. His protagonist, Tom Wingfield, recalls events at his troubled home in St. Louis, where his suffocating mother, Amanda Wingfield, badgers him to locate a gentleman caller for his sister, Laura, a shy, lame girl who occupies herself with music and a collection of glass animals. Readers approaching this semi-autobiographical Southern Gothic drama will appreciate study helps such as the biographical sketch and character list. Advanced students will value the selective critical extracts and annotated bibliography.

This volume explores Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie through the lens of family dysfunction. Coverage includes an examination of Williams's life and influences; a look at key ideas related to family dysfunction and The Glass Menagerie. CLICK on "View eBook" to read the pages of this online book.

The unique, three-volume Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature offers both a survey of literary themes and a collection of in-depth analyses of how these themes operate in individual literary works. Part I of this comprehensive new set contains essays on 50 prominent literary themes, with each essay describing how the theme has evolved over time, how it relates to other important themes, and why this theme is powerful enough to recur so often in great literature. Part II contains essays on specific themes in more than 300 individual classic works of literature. Each section on a particular work contains a brief introduction to the work as well as three essays on different literary themes within the work. Themes covered include alienation, coming of age, heroism, innocence and experience, race, science and technology, and more.

See pages 39-44 for a discussion of The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams has been called the most literary of the major dramatists. Find here his biography, a nice intro to his works, a discussion of the romantic texture in his pieces and more. Much of the scholarship dedicated to Williams has focused on the relationship between events in his life and his plays. Learn more through the critical essays offered here.

The works of Tennessee Williams are acclaimed for their tragic heroes and heroines, innovative staging techniques, and realistic themes. Examined works in this volume include his A Streetcar Named Desire, Battle of Angels, The Glass Menagerie, and Camino Real.

Brief summary of life and works or Tennessee Williams. Also looks at how Tennessee Williams' contemporaries and how his works reflect his life and his times.

This is the first complete, critical biography of Tennessee Williams, one of America's finest playwrights and the author of (among many important works) The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Night of the Iguana. Award-winning biographer Donald Spoto gives us not only a full and accurate account of Williams's life, he also reveals the intimate connections between the playwright's personal dramas and his remarkably autobiographical art. From his birth into a genteel Southern family, through his success, celebrity, and wealth, to his drug addictions, promiscuity, and creative struggles, Tennessee Williams lived a life as gripping as his plays. The Kindness of Strangers, based on Williams's own papers, his mother's diaries, and interviews with scores of friends, lovers, and professional associates, is, in the author's words, a portrait of "a man more disturbing, more dramatic, richer and more wonderful than any character he created."

This deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life--his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin--Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams's plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams's tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts.

critical essays on Tennessee Williams and The Glass Menagerie