Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Vassilis Manoussakis (University of the Peloponnese)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1944

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Play

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

In 1942, and after a series of controversial plays which provoked strong and ambivalent reactions, Tennessee Williams decided to leave New Orleans to live in Mexico, because the environment would free him, as he used to say. Upon his arrival in Mexico, he immediately started work on a full-length play entitled

Stairs to the Roof

, which was about a clerk in a shirt factory with aspirations to reach something higher than the monotony of his job. This clerk found refuge in the solace and calmness of the store’s roof where he could smoke and think without interruption. This was the draft of the well-known play

The Glass Menagerie

. Williams did not stay in Mexico for a long time and moved back to New York, where he started work to support himself as a waiter first and then as a script-writer…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2976 words

Citation: Manoussakis, Vassilis. "The Glass Menagerie". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 February 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=742, accessed 24 April 2024.]

Save this article