Which playwright wrote A Streetcar Named Desire?

Tennessee Williams, in 1947, and the streetcar was real - a line in New Orleans that ran to a district called Desire, so the play's most famous image is a piece of municipal transport rather than a symbol he invented.

It made Marlon Brando, who was 23 and unknown when Elia Kazan cast him as Stanley, and it changed how American actors work. Brando's naturalism - mumbling, physical, apparently thinking rather than declaiming - was so unlike stage convention that older actors thought he simply could not be heard. The Method spread from that production outward through American film for the next thirty years.

Williams wrote the play out of the same material as the rest of his work. His sister Rose had a lobotomy in 1943, arranged by their mother, which left her institutionalised for the rest of her life, and fragile women destroyed by families and institutions run through everything he wrote; he supported her financially always. He also wrote as a gay man in a period when it could not be said directly, which is why the plays circle around things characters cannot name - and he died in 1983, alone in a hotel room.