44. The Kindness of Strangers

Stand and Deliver

Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire and its 1951 Oscar-winning film version starring Marlon Brando is an American classic. The story’s characters and dialogue have become a familiar and recurring element in our cultural references. One of the most famous was a line spoken by one of the leading characters, Blanche Dubois, an aging beauty whose troubled life is going awry. At a pivotal moment in the story, Blanche says, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

So famous is the line, many other authors have used The Kindness of Strangers as the title of their books, among them novels, travel books, and most appropriately, a 1997 biography of ...

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