Considered perhaps the greatest American playwright, Tennessee
Williams was raised in Mississippi and achieved success early on in his
career when he won the New York Critics' Circle Award in 1944-45 for the
Broadway debut of The Glass Menagerie. Williams went on to win the same
award and the Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire a mere three
years later. Despite all his fame and fortune, Williams loathed being a
celebrity. He found comfort in his relationship with Frank Merlo, who
tragically died in 1961 from Lung Cancer. Williams fell into a deep
depression soon after, and he too passed away tragically in a hotel room in
New York in 1983 from a drug overdose.
Alongside great writers in American Literature like Williams, Ring
Lardner is considered one of America's greatest short story writers. While
he never wrote a novel, Lardner was well acquainted with F. Scott
Fitzgerald whose editor helped publish Lardner's works. His only playwright
success came from a comedy he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman, called June
Moon. Ring Lardner was initially a sports columnist, which was why it was
fitting that his first publication was a short stories anthology centering
round baseball. Lardner died in 1933, but left behind a legacy of memorable
short stories, including Haircut.
Tennessee Williams spent much of his youth and formative years in and
around the cinema. Many critics account this for his desire to escape the
stormy marriage of his parents and to find solitude in a world that was not
ready to accept his sexuality. This formation of an understanding of how
the camera aids the story gave Williams the ability to present his plays in
such a manner that transfixed theater audiences into believing his central
characters.
According to an article in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, "In
his dual role as both narrator and character in the play, Tom Wingfield
-similar to the camera- pe...