Tennessee Williams's evocation of loneliness and lost love,The Glass Menagerieis one of his most powerful and moving plays. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a new introduction by Robert Bray.

Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arrive, Laura's romantic illusions are crushed.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. 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 received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his playBattle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have publishedThe Glass Menagerie(1944),A Streetcar Named Desire(1947),The Rose Tattoo(1951),Cat on a Hot Tin Roof(1955),Sweet Bird of Youth(1959),The Night of the Iguana(1961), andSmall Craft Warnings(1972).

If you enjoyedThe Glass Menagerie,you might likeCat on a Hot Tin Roof, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself'
Peter Shaffer, author ofEquus