‘Lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny’ — Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather. ‘One of the greatest American plays’ — Observer. Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire pits fantasy against reality in one of drama’s most electrifying collisions, brought to life through the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. This Penguin Modern Classics edition features an introduction by Arthur Miller. Blanche DuBois — fading, deluded, clinging to the remnants of a southern belle’s dignity — arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella and Stella’s husband, the raw and brutish Stanley Kowalski. ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,’ Blanche confesses, but Stanley offers none. As their violent conflict escalates, Blanche’s fragile hold on identity and sanity is steadily stripped away, and with it her last hope of happiness. The play was later immortalised on screen in the iconic film starring Marlon Brando, cementing its place as one of the most influential works of twentieth-century theatre. Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. His father, a travelling salesman, later moved the family to St Louis, where Williams and his sister found city life deeply uncongenial. After studying during the Depression he left college to take a clerical post at a shoe company, spending evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Penguin Modern Classics also publishes his plays The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). Readers who enjoyed A Streetcar Named Desire may also wish to discover The Glass Menagerie, likewise available in Penguin Modern Classics.
ISBN 13: 9780141190273
Author: Tennessee Williams
