Tennessee Williams is one of America's most respected playwrights. He was one of the select few playwrights responsible for American theatre's 'golden age', and with works like The Glass Menagerie and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, it is no surprise. Williams was born in Mississippi and spent most of his life in the South, which was the setting of most of his works. Williams was no stranger to adversity growing up; his father was an alcoholic who squandered away all of the Williams' family money, and young Tennessee was a social outcast at school. His only true friend growing up was his sister, Rose, and even she was not always there for Tennessee; she fell progressively more mentally ill as her life progressed until she underwent a prefrontal lobotomy. Williams' life was as full of pain and emotional torment as any of his stories; in fact, it was this hard life that motivated him to write such challenging and provocative tales. In The Glass Menagerie, Tom, a young man who Williams patterned after himself, is stuck in a repressive tenement in 1937 St. Louis with his overbearing mother, Amanda, and Laura, his shy sister. Amanda's husband, Mr. Wingfield, abandoned the three when Tom and Laura were both very young, and that abandonment began the cycle of emotional insecurity and decay that is reaching a climax as the play's action begins. Throughout the play Tom, Laura, and Amanda confront their hardships, both economic and emotional, by ignoring reality in favor of illusion. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof is often considered Williams' best work; only A Streetcar Named Desire is as well known or critically acclaimed. Set in 1950's Mississippi, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof is a slow motion theatrical train wreck: Brick, a former football star, drinks to forget his dead friend whom he had homosexual feelings for while his wife, Maggie, tries to get her father-in-law's inheritance as he slowly dies of canc...