rly. Having lost the sense of personal dignity, Willy decides to make a sacrifice for those he loves - he commits suicide in order that his sons, Biff and Happy, should get the insurance money and start a business.is a writer of high moral seriousness, whether he is dealing with personal versus social responsibility, as in All My Sons (1947), or with witch hunts past and present, as in The Crucible. Both are political - one contemporary, and the other set in colonial times. The first deals with a manufacturer who knowingly allows defective parts to be shipped to airplane firms during World War II, resulting in the death of his son and others.writes a plain and muscular prose that under the force of emotion often becomes eloquent, as in Linda Loman s famous speech in Death of a Salesman, where she talks to her two sons about their father: I don t say he sa great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He s not the finest character that ever lived. But he sa human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person. Williams (born as Thomas Lanier Williams) (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. He changed his name when he left home for New Orleans. It had been his college nickname because his father was from Tennessee.Williams wrote two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs.Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975), and a novella, The Knightly Quest (1966). He is the author of collection of stories One Arm (1948), Hard Candy (1954), Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974), and a collection of poetry In the Winter of Cities (1956). He is valued most of all as a playwright. Tennessee Williams showed his mastery of dialogue and movement on the stage in a series of plays. They treat the emotional involvements and frustrations with which Williams chiefly concerned himself. Although Tennessee Williams was Miller s contemporary, his concern was not with social matters, but with personal ones. If Miller is often the playwright of social conscience, then Williams was the playwright of our souls. His earlier works were in production around the world. He dominated the American theatre for twenty years, beginning with Battle of Angels (1940). It was the first play to bring him public attention, and it evolved into Orpheus Descending (1957). He won national acclaim with The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (.1950), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Roof (1955), Garden District (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1962). All these plays were made into films, and he wrote an original film script for Baby Doll (1956). In the mid-sixties, he started writing the darker plays of his late phase, beginning with Slapstick Tragedy (1965), which includes The Mutilated and Gnadiges Fraulein; The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968); In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel ( 1969); The Two Character Play (1969), later rewritten and staged as Out City (1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1976), A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979), and a play about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald entitled Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). contrast to Miller s spare, plain language, Williams s writing is delicate and sensuous; it is often colored with lush imagery and evocative rhythms. Miller s characters are, by and large, ordinary people with whom we identify because they are caught up in. The social tensions of our times. Williams s characters are often women who are Lost ladies , drowning in their own neuroses, but somehow mirroring a part of our own complex psychological selves.actual scenes in Williams s plays are usually purely realistic, even though these scenes may deal with colorful and extreme characters. But Williams usually theatricalized the realism with music in the wings or symbolic props, such as Laura s unicorn in The Glass Menagerie or the looming statue of Eternity in Summer and Smoke (1948). He always conceived his plays in visually arresting, colorful, theatrical environments.Glass Menagerie has become an American classic. When it was ...
