1938

1938 stands as a threshold year in Tennessee Williams's development, the point at which academic training gave way to professional vocation. In that year Williams graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in English, completing the formal education that had begun at the University of Missouri and continued through extension courses at Washington University in St. Louis. The same year saw the completion of Not About Nightingales, a full-length play set in a prison that Williams had drafted while still a student. That play, with its explicit leftist coloration and its focus on a brutal society's injustices against the hurt individual, would remain unproduced for over six decades until Colin Redgrave brought it to Broadway in 1999 in a powerful production. The play's social consciousness—its depiction of systemic cruelty and the individual crushed by it—prefigured the concerns Williams would later embed in the more recondite tonalities of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, where social conditions became symbolized rather than directly dramatized.

Professional Breakthrough and the Birth of a Name

1938 also marked the first public appearance of the name "Tennessee Williams." In 1939, Story magazine published "The Field of Blue Children" with the byline that would become famous, but the name had been adopted the previous year. More concretely, 1938 brought Williams his first significant institutional recognition: an award from the Group Theatre for a group of short plays collectively titled American Blues. The Group Theatre, founded by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford after they broke away from the Theatre Guild, had been the crucible of the Stanislavski Method in America. The award led directly to Williams's association with Audrey Wood, who became his agent for the next thirty-two years. This connection proved decisive: Wood would shepherd his career through the disastrous Boston tryout of Battle of Angels in 1940, the Hollywood screenplay draft of The Gentleman Caller in 1943, and the triumphant Broadway opening of The Glass Menagerie in 1945.

The Social and Political Context of 1938

The year 1938 was also the tail end of the Depression era, a period that had shaped Williams's early consciousness. The Theatre Guild's Bureau of New Plays Award, which Williams had won about a decade earlier for $1,250—a small fortune in that Depression year—had been, to Arthur Miller's knowledge, the only attempt by a Broadway producer to encourage playwrights beyond Manhattan boundaries. The economic hardship of the era informed the class dynamics that would later pulse through A Streetcar Named Desire. The play's New Orleans setting, with its "raffish charm" and its "relatively warm and easy intermingling of races," was a world away from the plantation gentility of Belle Reve, but the tensions between the Kowalskis and the DuBois family—between the upwardly mobile working class and the decaying Southern aristocracy—were rooted in the economic realities of the 1930s. Stanley Kowalski's invocation of the Napoleonic code, under which "what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa," and his declaration "I am the king around here" echoed the era's anxieties about property, power, and the reordering of social hierarchies. The play's concern with the outsider in American society and its raising of the question of justice, as Arthur Miller noted, emerged from the inside out, but its social reality was inseparable from the Depression-era landscape in which Williams had come of age.

The Enduring Significance of 1938

In the broader arc of Williams's career, 1938 represents the year when the playwright's formal training ended and his professional identity began to take shape. The works completed and the connections forged in that year laid the groundwork for the extraordinary decade that followed: the Chicago opening of The Glass Menagerie in 1944, the Broadway triumph of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, and the Pulitzer Prize that followed. The social consciousness that animated Not About Nightingales never entirely disappeared from Williams's work, even as his later plays moved the individual and his inner life to the center. As Williams himself would write in 1957, his basic allegorical theme was "the crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better." That theme, first articulated in the prison bars of Not About Nightingales and the award-winning one-acts of American Blues, found its fullest expression in the broken world of A Streetcar Named Desire, where a woman who had "always depended on the kindness of strangers" was destroyed by the very forces that 1938 had set in motion.