Tennessee Williams emerged from obscurity and poverty suddenly, almost overnight on December 26, 1944, when the Lyric Theatre in Chicago opened The Glass Menagerie.txt. That opening catapulted the impoverished, struggling writer to stardom.1 Williams called it “a memory play,” which he began working on in June of 1943 as a story about a young girl not unlike his sister Rose, with whom he was very close, who would finally undergo a highly experimental prefrontal lobotomy in 1943 to treat her worsening mental disorder. The barbaric, “ice pick” procedure designed to insure her docility left her institutionalized for the remainder of her life. A rejected screenplay at MGM studios, “The Gentleman Caller,” and a short story, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (published in 1948), featuring a glass- collecting introvert named Laura who takes refuge in repeatedly listening to old music on a 1920s Victrola, were the play's prototypes. These became, then, in subsequent years, The Glass Menagerie, Rose Williams transformed to the equally fragile Laura Winfield, herself the prized unicorn in her magic kingdom, her collection of glass figurines. As Williams suggests in his notes to the play, Laura (Rose) “is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf “ (cited in the New York Times obituary of Rose). The story and play set the tone for a life's work that would be personal, autobiographical, and more poetical and symbolic than realistic or naturalistic. The play's staging was precedent breaking, featuring slide projections and nonrealistic, often dreamlike lighting and was finally more about memories of failed fatherhood (or parenthood) than about the failures of capitalist economics, although the latter was not without pertinence in an America still emerging from the Great Depression.