A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire is a play by the American playwright Tennessee Williams, first performed on Broadway in 1947, set in New Orleans and centered on Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle who arrives to stay with her sister Stella and Stella's husband Stanley Kowalski after losing the family estate and her teaching position amid a scandal. Blanche's fragile pretensions to refinement and her concealment of her own past collide with Stanley's aggressive, unmasking hostility, and the play builds toward his assault on Blanche while Stella is in labor, an act Stella ultimately chooses not to believe in order to preserve her marriage, leaving Blanche committed to a mental institution. Williams wrote the play in a poetic, symbolically charged naturalism, using the streetcar line named Desire that carries Blanche to her sister's home as an emblem of the desire and self-destruction driving the story. Winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, A Streetcar Named Desire is considered one of the major achievements of twentieth-century American theater and established Williams, alongside Arthur Miller, as a defining voice of postwar American drama.