| Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams,
the second child of three, in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911.
Tom, as he was known for most of his life, earned the nickname Tennessee
from a college roommate who attributed the name, jokingly to Williams heritage
as a Tennessee pioneer. |
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Tennessee Williams family life was full of tension and despair. His
parents often engaged in violent arguments that frightened his older sister,
Rose, so much that one evening she went running out of the house. His father,
Cornelius, was a stern businessman who managed a shoe warehouse. Cornelius’
bouts with drinking and gambling (habits that later ailed Tennessee) sent
rumors about the family throughout the towns in which they lived (Williams
moved 16 times in 15 years). His mother, who is often compared to the controlling
Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, allowed Rose’s doctor to perform
a frontal lobotomy on Rose - an event that greatly disturbed Williams who
cared for Rose throughout most of her adult life. However, Tennessee, Rose
and his brother Walter remained close to their mother, Edwina, often encouraging
her to leave their abusive father.
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| In 1931, Williams was admitted to the University of Missouri where
he saw a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts and decided to become a playwright.
His journalism program was interrupted however, when his father forced
him to withdraw from college to work at the International Shoe Company.
There, he worked with a good friend named Stanley Kowalski who would resurface
as a character in Streetcar. Williams reenrolled in college at Washington
University only to be dropped in 1937. Finally, in 1938, Williams graduated
from the University of Iowa, already having produced several of his plays
locally (first by a lively theater group in St. Louis called “The Mummers”).
After 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. |
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| Tennessee’s primary sources of inspiration for his works were the
writers he grew up with, his family and the South. The work that had the
most influence on Williams was that by Frederico Garcia Lorca, Arthur Rimbaud,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Hart Crane and D.H. Lawrence. His play I Rise in
Flame, Cried the Phoenix was written as a tribute to D.H. Lawrence,
dramatizing the events surrounding Lawrence's death. |
In 1945, Tennessee earned his first commercial success
with The Glass Menagerie. The play tells the story of Tom, his disabled
sister, Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda who tries to make a
match between Laura and a gentleman caller. Many people believe that Tennessee
used his own familial relationships as inspiration for the play. |
| Shortly after Menagerie closed, the playwright was already
at work on a new piece which contained the image of a young woman who had
just been stood up by the man she was planning to marry. He saw her sitting
alone in a chair by a window in the moonlight. By 1947, this piece was
finished and performed on the stage as A Streetcar Named Desire.
Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski became household names nearly overnight,
and the script continued to make its way into theaters and cinemas worldwide
(most recently it was remade for television, starring Jessica Lange and
Alec Baldwin). |
In 1955, after winning the Donaldson Award, the New York
Drama Critics Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Streetcar, Tennessee
Williams produced another commercial success, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
This play dramatizes the conflicts of a Mississippi family following the
diagnosis of their father’s cancer. It also won a Pulitzer Prize and became
a popular film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives. |
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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. |
| Williams died tragically in 1983 (he choked to death
on the plastic top to his eye medication which he possibly mistook for
a sleeping pill). He left behind a series of successful plays and screen
adaptations. He was noted for bringing to his audiences a slice of his
own life and the feel of southern culture. Elia Kazan said of Tennessee:
“Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is
in his life.” |
