The Life of a Poet

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911 into a family that would inspire and be seen in his writing for his entire life. His mother, Edwina, was an aggressive (and at times oppressive) woman, obsessed with memories of her days as a young Southern debutante. His father, Cornelius, was a traveling salesman from a prestigious Tennessee family (from which Williams earned his nickname) who tended to be both distant and abusive. His younger brother, Dakin, was his father's favorite and bonded little with young Tom. His older sister Rose, however, was in early years his confidant and friend and later became one of his primary inspirations for poetic characters in his plays.

As one might guess, Williams' family life was full of tension and despair. His parents often engaged in violent arguments that frightened his older sister, Rose. Cornelius' bouts with drinking and gambling (habits that later ailed Tennessee) sent rumors about the family throughout the towns in which they lived. In 1931 Williams entered the University of Missouri where, after seeing a production of Ibsen's Ghosts, he decided to study playwriting. He would not graduate there, however, instead transferring to Washington University after a brief stint of forced employment at his father's shoe company, and then transferred again in 1937 to the University of Iowa. It was while he was attending this institution that one of the most pivotal events in Tennessee's life and work occurred.

Williams and his sister Rose had been inseparable when they were young. Later in life, when Rose was crippled with fear and depression caused by increasing tensions in the Williams household, Tennessee remained her best friend and her greatest admirer. The extent of her emotional and mental illnesses, which had kept her in private sanatoriums for years, was so severe that her parents finally took the advice of doctors who were suggesting a new and radical procedure. In 1937, Rose was given one of the first frontal lobotomies ever performed. The doctors who had suggested the operation - in which nerve endings in her brain would be severed - believed it could do nothing but help Rose's state. In fact, Rose no longer felt physical or emotional distress but also lost any vitality left in her soul. Though the operation was free to the family, the effects were costly in the eyes of Tennessee. Twenty years after the operation, the effects were still so keenly felt that Williams used them as impetus for Suddenly Last Summer.

Still reeling from Rose's tragic operation, Williams graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. After looking for - and failing to find - work in Chicago, he moved to New Orleans where he changed his name from Tom to Tennessee and launched his career as a writer. His first major success was 1945's The Glass Menagerie. By 1947 his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, hit the stage. In 1955, after winning the Donaldson Award, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Streetcar, Tennessee Williams produced another commercial success, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

His momentum seemed to slow at that point, and in 1957, depressed by the poor reception received for his play Orpheus Descending, Williams began psychoanalysis for problems including his feelings of failure, his rocky relationship with his partner Frank Merlo, the death of his father, and his dependencies on alcohol and drugs. It was at this time that, most likely still plagued by the notion that he might be afflicted with the same mental and emotional problems as his sister had been, Tennessee began writing Suddenly Last Summer. The play was produced together with another short play - Something Unspoken - under the title Garden District, named after the New Orleans location in which both plays took place. The production was a critical success, and ran for 216 performances at the Off-Broadway York Theatre.

In 1979, Williams returned to Florida, where he had previously spent time in Key West and St. Augustine relaxing and collecting ideas for his work. This time, Williams served as Artist-In-Residence at the Hippodrome State Theatre in Gainesville where audiences saw the world premier of Tiger Tail - his stage adaptation of the film Baby Doll.

Tennessee Williams died tragically On February 23, 1983. He had written about 30 full-length plays, numerous short plays, two volumes of poetry, and five volumes of essays and short stories, all of which were filled with large doses of southern culture and the conflicts between sexuality, society, and Christianity that had been so much a part of his own life. 25 years after his death, Williams's legacy of poetic drama is still alive and well.