Tennesse Williams was the author of some of the most famous American plays of the 20th century - "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "The Glass Menagerie" being probably his best-known works. Yet, despite the huge international popularity of Tennessee Williams' writing, there is little serious work on him and the sources of his ideas, and the relationship between the writer's private suffering and his public art. Hayman argues that the brilliance of Williams' plays lies in the violent emotionalism of his plots, and that all his most obsessive themes derived from his own experience and in particular from his childhood. Hayman explains the torments of Williams' early life, showing how the themes recur throughout his writing, and looks at the way in which he suggested social and cultural disintegration through the medium of personal breakdown. The book - neither a straight biography nor a work of literary criticism - is based on a wide range of documentary material and interviews with Williams' colleagues, friends and professional associates, and sheds new light on Tennessee Williams and his work.