Streetcar Named Desire Context

American Literature

American Literature is literature written or produced predominantly in English in the United States of America and its preceding colonies.
The American Revolutionary Period is notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.
Writer and critic John Neal helped advance America's progress towards a unique literature and culture, by criticising predecessors like Washington Irving for imitating their British counterparts and influencing others like Edgar Allen Poe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson pioneered the influential Transcendentalism movement. The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writers like Harrier Beecher Stowe. These efforts were supporterd by the continuation of slave narratives.
American writers expressed both disillusionment and nostalgia following WW1. The short stories and novels of F. Scott Fitszgerald captured the mood of the 20s.
One of the developments in later 20th century American literature has been an increase in the literature written by ethnic, Native American and LGBT writers; Postmodernism has also been important during the same period.

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"The ideal by which equality of oppurtunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirationsand goals to be achieved."
A national ethos of the US, the set of ideals in which freedom includes the oppurtunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers.
It is rooted in the American Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that 'all men are created equal' with the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
Many American authors added American ideals to their work as a theme or other reocurring idea, to get their point across. There are many ideals that appear in American literature such as, all people are equal, the USA is the Land of Oppurtunity, independence is valued, the American Dream is attainable, and everyone can succeed with hard work and determination.
The American Dream has been credited with helping to build a cohesive American experience, but has also been blamed for inflating expectations. Some commentators have noted that despite deep-seated belief in the egalitarian American Dream, the moder American wealth structure still perpetuates racial and class inequalities between generations. One sociologist notes that advantage and disadvantage are not always connected to indiviudal successes or failures, but often to prior position in a social group.

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Geographically, Old South is the U.S. States in the Southern United States that were among the group of 13 British colonies which declared independence in 1776 and formed the United States of America. The region is differentiated from the Deep South and Upper South by being limited to these states' present-day boundaries rather than those of their colonial predecessors.
Culturally, "Old South" is used to describe the rural, agriculturally-based, and slavery-reliant economy and society in the Antebellum South, prior to the 1861–65 American Civil War, in contrast to the "New South" of the post-Reconstruction.
The romanticized story of the "Old South" is the story of slavery's plantations, as famously in Gone With the Wind. Pre-Civil War Americans regarded Southerners as distinct people, who possessed their own values and ways of life. During the three decades before the Civil War, popular writers created the stereotype that described the South as a land of aristocratic planters, beautiful southern belles, poor white trash, faithful household slaves, and superstitious fieldhands. This image of the South as "a land of cotton where old times are not forgotten" received its most popular expression in 1859 in a song called "Dixie," written by a Northerner named Dan Emmett to enliven shows given by a troupe of blackfaced minstrels on the New York stage.

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Tennessee Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911. His friends began calling him Tennessee in college, in honour of his Southern accent and father's home state. Williams father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy drinker. Williams mother, Edwina, was a clergymans daughter prone to hysterical attacks.
In 1918, the family moved to St Louis and started to deteriorate. C.C.'s drinking increased, the family moved 16 times in 10 years, and William's was ostracised and taunted at school.
After being bedridden for two years as a child due to severe illness, Williams grew into a withdrawn, effeminate adolescent whose chief solace was writing. He went to study journalism in Missouri where he wrote his first plays, but his father withdrew him from college to work at the same shoe company where he himself worked.
After three years at the shoe company, Williams had a minor nervous breakdown. He then returned to college; while he was studying there a theatre group produced two of his plays.
In the years following his graduation, Williams lived a bohemian life, working menail jobs and moving from city to city. He continued to work on drama, studying playwriting in New York.
After this his work began to win prizes and he was elevated to the upper echelon of American playwrites at the time.
Williams died in 1983 when he choked on a medicine-bottle cap in an alcohol related incident.

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