Though Williams expressed himself, sometimes quite candidly, about his private life, he was always reluctant to give information about his working methods. Yet he repeatedly mentioned the influence of three writers - D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Anton Chekhov - and cited numerous others; from an examination of recent criticism it is possible to compile a list that includes Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O'Neill, Harold Pinter, Luigi Pirandello, Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, and Thornton Wilder. I shall examine the effect on Williams's works of his acknowledged mentors and determine the guise of their presence in the plays. A recent investigation about the significance of Oscar Wilde in this context adds a new perspective on Williams's modes of reading and borrowing and on the subtle planes of intertextuality in his work.

D. H. Lawrence's influence on Tennessee Williams was documented by Korman J. Fedderl as early as 1966. Fedder's analyses of thirty years ago are still persuasive but his conclusions need revising now that the respective statures of the two artists are more accurately assessed. There is external evidence that Williams had read the works of D. H. Lawrence. In 1939 already he had manifested his admiration for the English novelist by visiting Lawrence's widow, Frieda, in Taos, New Mexico and by promising her to complete a play about her husband.