[The article from which this excerpt was drawn was originally published in The Nation, December 20, 1947.]

Two years ago when Tennessee Williams was being hailed as the best new playwright to appear in a decade I was among those who were inclined to wait and see, but "A Streetcar Named Desire" … is amply sufficient to confound us doubters. In mood and manner it is, to be sure, strikingly like "The Glass Menagerie." Indeed, the theme and even the story might be said to be the same, since both dramas are concerned with the desperate, unsuccessful effort of a female character to hang on to some kind of shabby gentility. But the new work is sure and sustained where the former was uncertain and intermittent. Gone are all the distracting bits of ineffectual preciosity, all the pseudo-poetic phrases, and all those occasions when the author seemed about to lose his...