[The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in The New York Post, December 4, 1947.]

[A Streetcar Named Desire] is a feverish, squalid, tumultuous, painful, steadily arresting and oddly touching study of feminine decay along the lower Mississippi…. Mr. Williams is an oncoming playwright of power, imagination and almost desperately morbid turn of mind and emotion. In his latest work to reach Broadway, the dramatist is telling the story of a doomed Southern girl who seems startlingly like what the foolish old mother of his previous drama, "The Glass Menagerie," might well have been at a similar age. Hers, to put it mildly, is not a pleasant life story. Essentially a romantic and dreamy young woman, it is her fate to represent in her frail spirit the decline and fall of a long line of decadent Southern aristocrats, and, for all her sentimental imagination, she ends as...