The Glass Menagerie - Softcover

Williams, Tennessee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811218945 ISBN 13: 9780811218948

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2011

Synopsis

When it opened in Chicago in 1944, The Glass Menagerie marked a turning point in American theater and in the life of its then unknown author. Tennessee Williams’s elegiac masterpiece brought a radical new lyricism to Broadway—and today the tragedy, fragility, and tenderness of this “memory play” endure.In a cramped St. Louis apartment the aging Southern belle Amanda Wingfield, long preoccupied by memories of gentlemen callers and a world that no longer exists, is energized by the dilemma of how to save what remains of her family. Her restless son Tom — factory worker, aspiring poet, and the narrator of the play — is swept up in Amanda’s comic and heartbreaking schemes to find Laura, his agonizingly shy and handicapped sister, a husband.This new edition of The Glass Menagerie comes with an exciting introduction by the playwright Tony Kushner. Williams’s classic essay on the effect of swift and unexpected fame, “The Catastrophe of Success,” his original production notes, and a new essay on the autobiographical background of the play by the distinguished Williams scholar Allean Hale are also included.

About this title

Review:

Seeing The Glass Menagerie was like stumbling on a flower in a junkyard -- Williams had pushed language and character to the front of thestage as never before.--Arthur Miller

About the Author:

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 A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), 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).

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0811218945
• ISBN 13: 9780811218948
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 160