Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was a great critical and financial success for Tennessee Williams. The play opened on Broadway on March 24, 1955, ran for nearly 700 performances, and won all the major awards, including Williams's second Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The MGM film adaptation in 1958, although deplored by Williams, was lucrative and made the playwright financially secure for the rest of his life. Major New York revivals in 1974 and 1990 confirmed the appeal of Cat to successive generations of theatregoers. To give the dimension of a Broadway career to these bare facts of success is my intention in the pages that follow. The inner story of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof begins with Williams's need to reverse a pattern of failure that became alarming with the early closing of Camino Real in 1953. But writing in this “place of stone,” to quote the original epigraph of Cat, occasioned the practice of a deceptive realism that satisfied both the economic law of Broadway and the artistic prompting of Tennessee Williams's endangered career. In this work of mediation, the realistic conventions of the Southern literary plantation were used to obscure Williams's skepticism for the theatre of “de-monstration.”