Summary

A Streetcar Named Desire earned Tennessee Williams the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. The landmark play is centered on the faceoff between Blanche DuBois, a symbol of the Old South, and Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial working class in America.

Scene One opens to the exterior view of a two-story corner building on a street named Elysian Fields in New Orleans, Louisiana. “The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm” (Scene One, p. 3). The building contains two apartments—one upstairs and one down. It is early dusk in the beginning of May, and the sounds of “Negro entertainers at a barroom around the corner” permeate the air (Scene 1, p. 3).

Two women, one white and one black, are sitting on the steps of the building. The white woman, Eunice, lives in the upstairs apartment, and...