Some critics felt that the issue of blacks in America addresses an obsessive national concern, especially concerning the ambiguity of relations between whites, on one hand, and blacks or Indians, on the other. Therefore it was considered that the main theme of American Gothic is slavery. Tennessee Williams, born in 1911 and grew up in the American South, came to see it as being hopelessly corrupted by racism. His plays offer a devastating portrait of the prejudices of his native region. Even if racism is not often met in his works, at least compared with other major Southern writers, we can observe Williams's strong social conscience. In 1966, Tennessee Williams was asked in an interview if he would write directly about political events, as …show more content…
The biographer made some assumptions about the stories that she could tell the children, and ”from her distant gaze in the photographs” it seems that these stories have nothing to do with the charming and romantic south. William’s plays are addressing the social issues, talking about the people he met during his travels through the country in 1939, such as poor, the unemployed and the homeless, as a result of the economic crisis. In "Candles to the Sun" the playwright placed the action in Alabama, where the miners were trying to unionize. And a press article about a prison riot in Philadelphia, offered him the plot for "Not About Nightingales", dramatizing a group of inmates who challenged the fascist power of the warden, revealing the playwright’s anti-fascist principles. Of all the social issues of his time, racism is what most disgusted Tennessee Williams. Being himself part of a minority, he understood very well the stigma and the prejudices of the society. Displeased that "The Glass Menagerie" played in front of an all-white public, has imposed on himself that "any future contract I make will contain a clause to keep the show out of Washington while this undemocratic practice