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Tennessee Williams was born in a town of Columbus on 26th, March, 1911 and he changed his name “Thomas” into “Tennessee” in 1939. He attended the University of Missouri from 1931 until 1933 and Washington University in St. Louis from 1936 until 1937 before earning his A.B. degree from the University of Iowa in 1938. If ever anyone was born to be a dramatist, Williams was. Throughout his 40 years’ literature career, Williams was a productive writer who wrote not only more than forty dramas, but also a novel, two volumes of poetry as well as six volumes of prose and three short stories. Among his plenty of dramas, The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are widely regarded as his masterpieces. Williams’ other famous dramas include Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Last Summer (1958) and The Milk Train Does Not Stop Here Anymore (1963).
Williams is well-known for his unique artistic creation technique to describe the contemporary American society. His works focus on the dilemma of those normal people who are abandoned by society and highlight the contradiction and conflict between the characters and the social reality. Among those characters, most of them are faded women or men tortured by hard life and vulnerable mental state. They are desperate, neurotic, and lonely and more or less suffer from some mental problems. They also fail to establish connection with real world, so they hide in their own make-believe worlds constructed by imagination and illusion.
The Glass Menagerie which describes the hard living situation of an ordinary family in southern America is regarded as the pioneer work of the modern drama. Once published, this drama aroused widespread concern in society and ran 561 performances in Broadway. This drama mainly describes the subtle relationship among members in an old-fashioned family, including the abandoned mother Amanda; the crippled and sensitive daughter Laura and the son Tom who works at warehouse and has strong enthusiasm with poetry. Jim, Tom’s friend, is a visitor to the family and gets Laura’s affection. In the drama, Amanda as a faded southern belle raises her two children on her own in harsh economic condition after being abandoned by her husband. With the fear that her children will suffer her tragedy, she tries her best to mold her daughter to become the southern belle like herself and helps her to find a satisfactory husband. However, Laura’s disability makes her hardly have any association with others and traps in her own imaginary world which represents by her glass menagerie. She used to have a crush on Jim. But the guest of the family later tells the fact that he is engaged and so breaks the illusion of Laura. The drama ends when Tom claims to leave his family while Laura blowing out all the candles and flinches in the darkness.