The production of his first two Broadway plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, secured Tennessee Williams's place, along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, as one of America's major playwrights of the twentieth century. Critics, playgoers, and fellow dramatists recognized in Williams a poetic innovator who, refusing to be confined in what Stark Young in the New Republic called "the usual sterilities of our playwriting patterns," pushed drama into new fields, stretched the limits of the individual play and became one of the founders of the so-called "New Drama." Praising The Glass Menagerie "as a revelation of what superb theater could be," Brooks Atkinson in Broadway asserted that "Williams's remembrance of things past
