General/Context

• It was first performed in the late 1940's so it is considered very modern for American Theatre but this is less than 100 years after the American Civil war.
• The American Civil war was a war about slavery between the north and south
• The late 1940's was before the basic integration of people of colour into society and before things like Selma and Martin Luther King
• Tennessee Williams plays into a tradition of southern literature, inspired by authors like William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. This is a very important part of the localization of the culture of the play.
• In the 1940’s, the South, particularly New Orleans, it was viewed as another country compared to New York or California.