Chapter 17 - “The Place I Was Made For”

Summary

No place was more important to Tennessee Williams than New Orleans, beginning with his first, brief stay as a young man, through the end of his life, some four decades later. He engaged the city through one-act plays, short stories, verse, and, of course, in A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams was able to express his inner conflicts over whether and how to restrain his appetite for sensual experience through the rich array of characters and scenarios he encountered in daily life around the city. As such, the city became something like a mirror in which he discovered his soul, a near perfect fusion of a particular place with a particular artist’s sensibility.