Publisher Description
Menagerie was Williams' first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our preeminent 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 it is studied and performed in classrooms and theaters around the world. 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' essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success", as well as a short section of Williams' own "Production Notes".
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About Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), born Thomas Lanier in Columbus, Mississippi, won Pulitzer Prizes for his dramas A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other plays include The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Night of the Iguana. He also wrote a number of one-act plays, short stories, poems, and two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Moishe and the Age of Reason. He died at the age of seventy-two.
About Joseph Kent
Manly P. Hall (1901-1990) founded the Philosophical Research Society in 1934, a non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination of useful knowledge in the fields of philosophy, comparative religion and psychology. In his long career, spanning more than 70 years of dynamic public activity, Mr. Hall delivered over 8000 lectures in the United States and abroad, authored over 150 books and essays, and wrote countless magazine articles.
Many of Mr. Hall's lectures have been transcribed and are available as pamphlets; others were taped live, and the audio recordings are available on CD's as well. He is perhaps best known for his 1928 classic, "The Secret Teachings of All Ages," an encyclopedia of the world's wisdom traditions and symbolic disciplines.
Today, younger generations are re-discovering the works and words of Manly Hall, finding that the material he put forth so many years ago is still relevant and useful today. Mr. Hall's hope for humanity was to learn from the greatest minds of all times so that we may solve current problems - both in society and in the individual - today.