Writing in 1959, at about the time Elia Kazan directed Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway, Tennessee Williams described his first successful play as being "about as violent as you can get on the stage. During the 19 years since then I have only produced five plays that are not violent". First among them The Glass Menagerie, the memory play which was first presented in London in 1948 and in which he employed every device of scenery, lighting, and music to evoke nostalgia. The following year, he scored one of his biggest successes with A Streetcar named Desire, in which a woman's pathetic fantasies of primness and respectability are stripped down and violently exposed in New Orleans. --back cover