Product Description

Fading southern belle Blanche Dubois depends on the kindness of strangers and is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella’s crude, brutish husband Stanley. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche’s fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #536 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the episcopal clergyman. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1961), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963; revised 1964) and Small Craft Warnings (1972).

Customer Reviews

A taut emotional journey
I am reading this for an AS English Literature course and have to say that whilst it is written with incredibly emotive and visual stage directions I found the actual story quite painful to read.

The story is based on the inter-relationships of three people. Blanche Dubois, an aristocratic well brought up woman who has definitely fallen on hard times and is having a difficult time dealing with the realities around her. She is a fragile creature in a hard world, a butterfly in a land of beasts. Blanche exhibits a strange double standard; on the one hand she appears otherworldly and untouched by man but as the story unfolds we discover that she has seen more than her fair share of pain, death and corruption. This wreaks a dreadful toll on a woman who is constantly grateful for the kindness of strangers.

The other two characters are Stella and her loutish husband Stanley Kowalski. Stanley is a neanderthol, a barbarous ape with a huge ego. He isn't stupid, as he soon finds out the truth about Blanche and knows his rights but he is so very masculine that I felt that I would have difficulty being in the same room as such a man who owns the very air around him. Stella, in comparison with her sister is a calmer character, more accepting of her fate and with the world. She truly loves her husband, brutish and base as he is. She is torn between love for him and her sisterly fealty.

I won't reveal the end. This is a book that must be read and a play that must be seen to be fully understood and appreciated. I loved the casting of Vivien Leigh, who did indeed go on to become a frail butterfly, and the animal magnetism of Marlon Brando. I hope anyone reading this will enjoy A Streetcar Named Desire also.

prompt delivert
This book was for my daughters school work, of which she says was a great read.