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.

Amanda is a mother who is a victim of fantasies about her withdrawn daughter, Laura. Laura wears a leg-brace because of a crippling childhood illness and is at home only in her private world that centers on a collection of glass animal figures. When Amanda persuades her son, Tom, to invite a friend from work for dinner with hopes that it will lead to romance for Laura, it changes the family forever.

No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.

Dramatic script relating the interactions of Amanda, her son, and her daughter, Laura and the very important gentleman caller.