The Glass Menagerie (New Directions Books)

A new edition of this beloved classic?with a new Tony Kushner introduction?to honor the centennial year, 2011, of America's greatest playwright.

When it opened in Chicago in 1944, The Glass Menagerie marked a turning point in American theater and in the life of its then unknown author. Tennessee Williams?s elegiac masterpiece brought a radical new lyricism to Broadway?and today the tragedy, fragility, and tenderness of this ?memory play? endure.

In a cramped St. Louis apartment the aging Southern belle Amanda Wingfield, long preoccupied by memories of gentlemen callers and a world that no longer exists, is energized by the dilemma of how to save what remains of her family. Her restless son Tom ? factory worker, aspiring poet, and the narrator of the play ? is swept up in Amanda?s comic and heartbreaking schemes to find Laura, his agonizingly shy and handicapped sister, a husband.

This new edition of The Glass Menagerie comes with an exciting introduction by the playwright Tony Kushner. Williams?s classic essay on the effect of swift and unexpected fame, ?The Catastrophe of Success,? his original production notes, and a new essay on the autobiographical background of the play by the distinguished Williams scholar Allean Hale are also included.