One of America's preeminent playwrights, Tennessee Williams restored poetry to the stage in the midst of a post-World War II surge of realism, sensitively peopling his plays with outsiders at odds with the mob rule that passes for civilization. Wrenched from the maternal grandfather he idolized to live in close St. Louis quarters with his strong-willed mother and hard-drinking travelling salesman father, he began writing as an escape, eventually turning his feelings of alienation into his first hit play, "The Glass Menagerie" (1945). His experience working at the hated shoe factory found its
