by Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. After spending most of his youth in St. Louis, Missouri, "Tennessee" (a name he chose because of his family's extensive roots in that state) moved to a New Orleans rooming house in the winter of 1938 and remained there through the spring of 1939. Proclaiming New Orleans "his favorite city in America, perhaps in the world" (Williams and Mead, p. 73), Williams returned there in 1945 to write A Streetcar Named Desire, a play that dramatizes the social and economic transition between traditional Southern life and the newly industrialized South.

Events in History at the Time of the Play

The industrial South. A Streetcar Named Desire chronicles the defeat of an aristocratic Southern belle by a new working-class society. What befalls Blanche DuBois in Williams's play befell many upper-class Southerners as industrialization swept away...