Historical Events related to Suddenly Last Summer
- 287 Saint Sebastian, said to be an inspiration for Suddenly Last Summer's Sebastian, dies at the hands of Roman soldiers, becoming a Christian martyr.
- 1535 Galapagos Islands (or the Encantadas) are discovered by Dominican Fray Tomás de Berlanga, the fourth Bishop of Panama.
- 1832 The Garden District of New Orleans begins to be developed. The area begins as one big plantation, but by 1900 grows into one of the wealthiest areas of New Orleans.
- 1846 The Donner Party, a group of families emigrating from Illinois and Iowa get trapped in an October snowstorm in California and are forced into one of the most famous acts of cannibalism in history.
- 1854 Herman Melville writes "The Encantadas, or the Enchanted Islands" for Putnam's Magazine, as a series of short travel sketches. It is later published as part of Piazza Tales.
- 1909 Rose Isabel Williams is born
- 1911 Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams is born
- 1918 The Williams family moves to St. Louis
- 1926 Hart Crane's My Grandmother's Love Letters is published, a poem that later inspired Suddenly Last Summer
- 1931 Tom Williams enrolls at University of Missouri
- 1932 Cornelius Williams withdraws Tom from college and forces him to work at the International Shoe Company
- 1935(?) Tom enrolls at Washington University in St. Louis
- 1936 Portuguese physician and neurologist António Egas Moniz develops a technique for destroying the tissue connecting the frontal lobes of the brain. This predecessor to the Lobotomy earns him a Nobel Prize in 1949.
- 1936 Drs.Walter Freeman and James Watts perform the first lobotomy in September.
- 1937 Tom leaves WU and enters the University of Iowa
- 1938 Without Tom's knowledge, Rose is given a frontal lobotomy
- 1939 Tom signs on with agent Audrey Wood. Also in that year, Tom takes up residence for a short time in New Orleans, Louisiana and changes his name from Tom to Tennessee.
- 1944 The Glass Menagerie debuts in Chicago on December 26th.
- 1945 Dr. Freeman invents the "ice-pick lobotomy", in which an ice pick inserted through the eye socket is tapped with a hammer into the prefrontal lobe.
- 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire is first produced
- 1955 Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is first produced.
- 1957 Orpheus Descending opens to poor reviews. Williams enters psychoanalysis. Soon after, he begins writing Suddenly Last Summer
- 1958 on January 7, Suddenly Last Summer debuts at the York Playhouse in New York with Something Unspoken under the title Garden District.
- 1959 The film adaptation of Suddenly Last Summer, starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift, is released. Both Hepburn and Taylor are nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for their performances.
- 1983 Tennessee Williams dies at the age of 71 after accidentally choking on the cap from a bottle of pills.
- 1995 Suddenly Last Summer finally makes its Broadway debut, again produced with Something Unspoken.
Saturday, October 11