Blessing's Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music (1982) is considered to be the best of his early plays. It centers on the relationship between a former nun and her aunt, who runs a bar in Houston.

Another of Blessing's plays that focuses on family relationships is Independence (1984). Here Blessing follows the lives of three daughters and their mentally ill mother.

Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1949) looks at the troubled relationship between a salesman and his two sons.

The Awakening, published in 1899, is Kate Chopin's masterly novel of a young woman who struggles to find self-knowledge and inevitably suffers the consequences of trying to establish herself as an independent spirit.