8vo. Original pictorial purple boards (minor lightening and bumps to extremities); dust jacket (toning, sunning to spine, light chipping along extremities).

FIRST EDITION. A Streetcar Named Desire was written while Williams was living in a small Toulouse Street apartment in New Orleans, its title derived from the Desire streetcar line which ran half a block away. It debuted on Broadway in November 1947 with Elia Kazan directing and then-unknowns Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois. The play was hailed as "a poignant and luminous story" in the 4 December 1947 New York Times review of the debut performance by Brooks Atkinson and ran for 855 shows before closing in 1949. The play earned Tennessee Williams the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play.