The Intricate World of Tennessee Williams

One of the greatest of American dramatists, Tennessee Williams wrote theatrical masterpieces that capture in poetic and often brutal language the desperate desires, dashed hopes, and damaged souls that belie the American Dream. His fragile and psychologically complex characters—Blanche Dubois, Stanley Kowalski, Maggie the Cat, Big Daddy, the Wingfields, and so many others—display both fragility and strength, passion and passivity, sensuality and timidity. No other American playwright surpasses Williams’s ability to create characters who linger in our memories for years, ghosts who haunt us as they themselves are haunted, yearning for freedom yet trapped in their own pasts. Discover, or rediscover, four of Williams’s most powerful works, Clothes for a Summer Hotel; Suddenly, Last Summer; Night of the Iguana; and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Course Number: LIT-40074   Credit: 2 units