Francis Ford Coppola
Lyrical and poetic and human and heartbreaking and memorable and funny.

Jack Kroll, Newsweek
In Streetcar Williams found images and rhythms that are still part of the way we think and feel and move.

Ken Furtado, Echo Magazine, 23 September 2004
The introductions, by playwrights as illustrious as Williams himself, are the gem of these new editions.

Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams' essay "The World I Live In." It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s. Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.

About the Author
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of the 20th century's most superb writers, was also one of its most successful and prolific. New Directions publishes Williams' letters, short stories, poems, fiction, and over fifty of his plays including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, Camino Real, Sweet Bird of Youth, Night of the Iguana, Orpheus Descending, and The Rose Tattoo. Arthur Miller, author of the plays Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons, and Broken Glass, is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, three Tony Awards, two Drama Critics Circle Awards, and an Obie.

FROM THE PUBLISHER