Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was the pen name of one of America's finest dramatists. Born Thomas Lanier Williams, he grew up in Mississippi and St. Louis. Williams began writing early, publishing his first short story at the age of fourteen. He attended the University of Washington and the University of Iowa and then worked at various jobs in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, and California. In 1939, his American Blues, a collection of short plays, was produced in New York to enthusiastic reviews. However, his next play, Battle of Angels, later rewritten and retitled Orpheus Descending, failed when it was produced in Boston. The Glass Menagerie, produced in 1944 and a tremendous success, was followed by A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1962). Williams also wrote the novella The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and his Memoirs (1975).

Williams's plays often deal with troubled, emotionally intense social misfits and are often set in the post-Civil War, or antebellum, South. Because of the intensity of emotion in these plays and because of their powerfully evocative settings, they are often referred to as examples of Southern Gothic. Williams was also a pioneering American Expressionist. Expressionism was an artistic movement of the early and mid-twentieth century that sought to express emotions by exaggerating the artistic medium itself. Expressionist painters tended to use heavy strokes of the brush or palette knife and vivid, intense colors. Expressionist dramatists often exaggerated the elements of spectacle and the literary techniques in their works, using lighting, sound, properties, and elements of the stage set for symbolic purposes.