In 1764, Horace Walpole published his novel The Castle of Otranto, giving birth to Gothic literature, a genre that spanned the 18th and 19th centuries and was known for spooky, often haunted castles ruins, extreme landscapes, passion-driven heroes and villains, and horrifying events. When Tennessee Williams began writing Suddenly Last Summer in 1957, almost 200 years later, a new genre inspired by Gothic fiction had become popular. This was Southern Gothic, a style that adopted the gloom, mystery, suspense, and the grotesque of Gothic writing and relocated it from medieval castles to the mansions of the post-Civil War south, replacing abandoned turrets with overgrown plantations, and damsels in distress with failed Southern belles. Placed against this backdrop, writers were able to use dark tone and sensationalism not merely for suspense, but to explore the culture and social issues of the American South. Southern Gothic literature was, as Williams himself described it, a style that captured "an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience," and then presented it for all to see.

The American South provided an obvious setting for such a genre. After the Civil War, the once-great plantations of the confederacy were little more than abandoned farms. They became symbols of the end of an era and synonymous with the decay of a culture. The Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana was just such a place. When it first began development in 1832, it consisted of plantations with huge mansions surrounded by lush gardens and owned by wealthy Americans who didn't want to deal with the tight quarters and ethnic diversity of the French Quarter. When the Civil War ravaged the Southern way of life, New Orleans was forced to adapt, becoming more urban, and the plantations of the Garden District were subdivided to accommodate the growing population. As smaller homes were built around the mansions, the area became a monument to the Antebellum south and the way that the decay of that culture was essentially being hidden, not destroyed.

What better place could there be to set a story about the destruction of an aristocratic family at the hand of violence and depravity than the stark, stately remains of a lost society? Sebastian's wild jungle-garden finds a comfortable home among old cast-iron balconies and echoing Victorian mansions. In the Garden District, Tennessee Williams found a fitting backdrop for his tragic tale in the remains of a culture with a tragic history.