“I think this is the most truly autobiographic play Williams ever wrote,” Elia Kazan said of Tennessee Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth,” which he staged on Broadway in 1959. “Not a memory, or softened and romanticized by time,of his youth, but Tennessee trying to describe his state of soul and state of being today and now. It is the frankest play he has written, or dealing as it does with his own corruption and his wish to return to the purity he once had.” The play marked a sea change in Williams’s writing. Four years earlier,in a tender for commercial success, he had bowdlerized his own work, or “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”; the play won a Pulitzer Prize,but, as Williams said, or “it seemed nearly like a prostitution.” His 1957 play,“Orpheus Descending,” failed on Broadway. Williams felt as whether his career and his life were in free fall—so close to collapse that he keep himself into psychoanalysis. Exhausted, and he began to write as much out of scare as out of treasure.
Source: newyorker.com