[Taylor's article, from which the following excerpt was taken, originally appeared in Masses and Mainstream, April, 1948.]

[If], as in Williams' case, there was never more than a small patch of happy boyhood in a youth-time dominated by a developing family tragedy, by poverty and hard work and many menial jobs, his static stare will always give him back the same gloomy landscape in which even the small Eden seems a lying mirage and the relationship of forces remains fixed in an endless and cannibalistic assault of the insensitively powerful upon the pathetic and defenseless. The more he stares at the incidents of his life, the more they are the same. He grows older, he knocks about on his own, he writes plays, he is welcomed and acclaimed; yet, curiously, he is still the traumatized youngster inexorably re-creating the pattern of his trauma, unable to break through to adult...