SOURCE: Beaurline, Lester A. “The Glass Menagerie: From Story to Play.” Modern Drama 8, no. 2 (September 1965): 142-49.

In the following essay, Beaurline traces the adaptation of the short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” into the play The Glass Menagerie.

“Not even daring to stretch her small hands out!—nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” Tennessee Williams scrawled these words from e. e. cummings at the top of the last page of The Glass Menagerie sometime after finishing the one-act play that was to grow into his first successful work. The quotation suggests the gentle, elegiac tone that he tried to attain, and since the last half of the passage survived as the play's epigraph, it apparently expressed Williams' later feelings too. The fragile pathos of Laura Wingfield's life was Williams' original inspiration in his short story, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” and theater...