Recommendations
Books Like The Glass Menagerie
Best books to read after The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Williams's 1945 memory play — Tom Wingfield's retrospective narration of his mother Amanda, his sister Laura, and the Gentleman Caller who briefly illuminates and then extinguishes Laura's hope — is the work in which Williams invented the memory play as a form and established the thematic preoccupations that define his major work. These recommendations extend the experience through Williams's other plays, through the mid-century American theatrical tradition, and through fiction that investigates family, memory, and the romantic imagination's encounter with brutal reality.
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A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams
The companion and the play that fully established Williams's reputation — Blanche DuBois in New Orleans. A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie are companion explorations of the southern belle unable to adapt to the world that has replaced hers (Amanda; Blanche), and both are organized around a male protagonist's ambivalent attempt to escape the trap that his connection to a fragile woman has set for him.
- 2Buy
Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
The companion American memory play — Willy Loman's memories intruding on the present. The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman are companion memory plays: both organized around a protagonist whose memories intrude on the present (Tom's retrospective narration; Willy's Expressionistic flashbacks), both about the damage done by a parent's romantic self-deception to the children who must live with it.
- 3Buy
Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill's companion in the tradition of the autobiographical family play — the Tyrones' terrible day. Long Day's Journey into Night and The Glass Menagerie are companion plays in which the playwright uses his own family as the material: Williams as Tom, O'Neill as Edmund, both escaping from families that needed them more than they could afford to be needed.
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Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
Anderson's companion in the tradition of the American work about the 'grotesques' — people deformed by the adoption of a single truth. Amanda Wingfield and the Glass Menagerie's characters are in the tradition of Anderson's grotesques: people whose inability to adapt to reality has given them a specific deformation (Amanda's faded southern gentility; Laura's retreat into the glass animals) that defines them.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
Salinger's companion in the tradition of the retrospective first-person American narrator — Holden Caulfield's account of three days in New York. The Glass Menagerie and The Catcher in the Rye are companion retrospective American narratives about the gap between what we remember and what actually happened, and about the unreliability of the narrator who is also the protagonist.
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's 1899 companion in the tradition of the southern woman who cannot adapt to the world that has replaced the one she was formed by — Edna Pontellier's gradual recognition of her own desires. Amanda Wingfield is in the tradition of the southern women in American literature who cannot adapt to the present: she maintains the fiction of her past (the seventeen gentleman callers) as a way of not facing what the present actually offers.
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
Williams's 1955 companion — Brick and Maggie and Big Daddy in a Mississippi mansion. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the fullest development of the Williams family play: where The Glass Menagerie is organized around escape and memory, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is organized around confrontation and confession, but both are investigations of the gap between what the family says and what the family means, and of the complicated love between people who need and damage each other.
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A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
Hansberry's 1959 companion in the tradition of the American family play about aspiration and constraint — the Younger family's attempt to move out of their cramped apartment. A Raisin in the Sun and The Glass Menagerie are companion family plays about the gap between the dreams that sustain a family and the reality that confronts it, and about the complicated love between family members who need each other and damage each other simultaneously.
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