Description
No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.
Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally." This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.
Reviews
"The revolutionary newness of The Glass Menagerie . . . was in its poetic lift, but an underlying hard dramatic structure was what earned the play its right to sing poetically." — Arthur Miller
"With the advent of The Glass Menagerie . . . Tennessee Williams emerged as a poet-playwright and a unique new force in theatre throughout the world." — Lyle Leverich in Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams
Also By: Tennessee Williams 
Caterpillar Dogs: and Other Early Stories
Paperback, 2023
Seven previously unpublished stories of the Great Depression by America’s poet laureate of the lost
The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin
Hardback, 2018
Four decades of correspondence of Tennessee Williams’s and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship.The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin
E Book, 2018
Four decades of correspondence of Tennessee Williams’s and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship.
Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws & Other One-Act Plays
Paperback, 2016
“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays—like firecrackers in a rope.” —Tennessee Williams
Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws & Other One-Act Plays
E Book, 2016
“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays—like firecrackers in a rope.” —Tennessee Williams
Also By: Robert Bray
Vieux Carré
E Book, 2016
Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry...
Vieux Carré
Paperback, 2003
Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry...
