Cat on a Hot Tin Roof | Tennessee Williams

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one of Tennessee Williams’s best-known works and his personal favorite. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Set in "the bed-sitting room of a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta" of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among his son Brick, Brick's wife Maggie the Cat, and his friendship with the late Skipper, as well as Brick and his father and other family.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof features several recurring motifs, such as social mores, superficiality, decay, sexuality's consequences, and death.Dialogue throughout is often rendered phonetically to represent accents of the American South.

The play was adapted as a motion picture by the same name in 1958, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman as Maggie and Brick, respectively. Williams made substantial excisions and alterations to the play for a revival in 1974.