For the 1959 film based on Williams' Orpheus Descending

Orpheus Descending

Orpheus Descending is a play by Tennessee Williams. It was first presented on Broadway in 1957 where it enjoyed a brief run with only modest success. The play is basically a rewrite of an earlier play by Williams called Battle of Angels, which was written in 1940, but had been closed on its opening...

, see The Fugitive Kind

The Fugitive Kind

The Fugitive Kind is a 1959 American drama film directed by Sidney Lumet. The screenplay by Meade Roberts and Tennessee Williams was based on the latter's 1957 play Orpheus Descending, itself a revision of his unproduced 1939 work Battle of Angels....

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Fugitive Kind is a 1937 play written by Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...

. The play is evocative of a Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...

Depression era play. The action takes place in a flophouse in Two Rivers, Mississippi during the waning days of 1936, as the New Year 1937 is imminent. The play features a lonesome clerk, who oversees a hotel that houses a collection of alcoholic losers and a rebellious college student. The owner of the hotel is an obsessive Jew. The clerk is befriended by an on-the-run gangster, Terry Meighan, who claims to be a victim of the corrupt social system. He represents hope to the hotel clerk.