Tragedy and Comedy in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Pages:105-107
Neelima Redhu (Extension Lecturer, Department of English, Govt. College, Barwala, Hisar, Haryana)

Tennessee Williams is considered one of America’s major playwrights. While his reputation is national and international, he is also very clearly a Southern writer. Born in Columbus, Mississippi, into a family related to some prominent Tennesseans, as well as the Georgia poet Sidney Lanier and raised in St. Louis, Williams had a distinctly Southern home life. It was to this experience that he turned when he first began to write plays, and nearly all of his major dramas are set in the South and portray the problems of Southern families and individuals. Like his fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, Williams has raised these regional figures to a level of wider relevance by addressing tragic conflicts of universal significance and application. Whether in the stage or screen version, most critics have agreed that the appeal of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof resides in its powerful, dominating, realistic characters Big Daddy, Maggie, and Brick.