He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961).
This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth. Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. One of America’s greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright’s perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now. This definitive edition also includes Williams&rsquoi essay “Person-to-Person,” Williams’ notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author’s life. Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many years-the present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003–2004 season. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year. The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father’s inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat.
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