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On a Streetcar Named Success

1947 essay by Tennessee Williams

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 25, 2026
Entity authorityQ4659860 ↗
Source-derived summary

"On a Streetcar Named Success" is an essay by Tennessee Williams about the corrupting impact of fame on the artist. The essay first appeared in The New York Times on November 30, 1947, four days before the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire. It was later republished as "The Catastrophe of Success" and often appears as an introduction to The Glass Menagerie.

References

Further reading

Williams, Tennessee; Christine R Day; Bob Woods (1978). Where I Live: Selected Essays. New York: New Directions. ISBN 0-8112-0705-6. OCLC 4004609.

Editorial summary

“On a Streetcar Named Success” enters the record as 1947 essay by Tennessee Williams. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Streetcar, Named and Success can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1947, 1978—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1947-11-30. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Streetcar, Named and Success.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“On a Streetcar Named Success” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Streetcar, Named and Success provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4659860. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1947 and 1978.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “On a Streetcar Named Success” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.