The Glass Menagerie pdf – Amanda Wingfield longs for the days of being a southern belle, courted by the gentry. Instead, she lives in a run-down St. Louis apartment with her son, Tom, and her daughter, Laura, who has a physical handicap and crippling shyness. The father has left home; Tom supports his mother and sister with a shoe factory job with which he is miserable. When Amanda convinces Tom to bring home from his workplace a “gentleman caller” for Laura, the illusions that Tom, Amanda, and Laura have each created in order to make life bearable collapse about them.