The fact of "class" was one that few American dramatists escaped in the thirties; man was primarily a social, not a psychological, animal. Thus Paul Green in his drama of southern decadence, The House of Connelly (1931), is less concerned with the forms of this decadence than with the juxtaposition of a healthy alternative. (p. 84)

We might profitably contrast the south of House of Connelly with the south of Tennessee Williams. As Green paints the decay of the old order it seems to be, at first, in the manner of Williams: "Now the grace of hospitality is gone, the jovial host is gone, gone is the slave. The furniture is falling to pieces…. The dead Connellys in their frames wait for the end." The living Connellys exist in a past world of Belle Reves and Blue Mountains; the old order is crumbling before the onslaughts of new social forces...