A Streetcar Named Desire - a Play Written by Tennessee Williams

‘A Streetcar Named Desire' is an award winning play written by Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams was born on March 26th 1911 and died at the age of 71 on February 25th 1983. Williams used aspects of his life to base his characters of his plays around. For example, Williams had an older, Rose, who was mentally unstable and her illness had a great influence on his work, as in this play Blanche's character was based around his sister's mental illness. Williams's most memorable characters, many of them female, contain elements of Williams's life. His loud, irresponsible male characters, such as Stanley Kowalski, were modelled on Williams's own father and other males who were present during his childhood. Tennessee Williams was an American writer who wrote many plays, novels and many more. ‘A Streetcar Named Desire' won many prizes and it reached a worldwide audience. Tennessee Williams' play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire' won him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. It is a play of strong characters and their different interaction with other characters. During the course of the play audiences witness characters being naïve and innocent which then follows onto self destruction as the play progresses.

The play was set in the late 1940s in New Orleans. There are many aspects of social and historical contexts which were also used in the play. Some of these include culture of the Deep South and women and society in the Deep South of USA. Women didn't have many rights as they do now, men held more power over women and they had different views on what a woman should do. They believed that women should stay at home, look after the children, cook and clean. They mainly led a domestic life. The culture of the Deep South included segregation which was the separation between black and white people, society was in the Great Depression, it was more urban and industrialised, there was high rate of poverty and