Tennessee Williams Biography - life, family, children, parents, name, story, death, wife, school
Tennessee Williams Biography
New York, New York
American dramatist, playwright, and writer
Tennessee Williams, dramatist and fiction writer, was one of       America's major mid-twentieth-century playwrights. He is best known       for his powerful plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Becoming Tennessee
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus,         Mississippi, on March 26, 1914, the second of three children of         Cornelius and Edwina Williams. His father, a traveling salesman, was         rarely home and for many years the family lived with his mother's         parents. As a result, the young boy developed a close relationship with         his grandfather, and also his older sister, Rose. William's         family life was never a happy one. His parents were resentful of each         other, his mother once describing her husband as "a man's         man" who loved to gamble and drink. When his father obtained a         position at a shoe factory, the family moved to a crowded, low-rent         apartment in St. Louis, Missouri.
About this time, young Thomas adopted the name Tennessee (presumably         because many of his descendants hailed from that state). Williams grew         to hate St. Louis. He and his sisters were often ridiculed by other         students because of their Southern accent.           He also skipped school regularly and did poorly in his studies,         preferring instead to escape into the world of reading and writing.
At the age of sixteen Williams published his first story. The next year         he entered the University of Missouri but left before taking a degree.         He worked for two years for a shoe company, spent a year at Washington         University (where he had his first plays produced), and earned a         bachelor of arts degree from the State University of Iowa in 1938, the         year he published his first short story under his literary name,         Tennessee Williams.
In 1940 the Theatre Guild produced Williams's Battle of Angels in Boston, Massachusetts. The play was a total failure and was         withdrawn after Boston's Watch and Ward Society banned it.         Between 1940 and 1945 he lived on grants (donated money) from the         Rockefeller Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, on         income scraped together from an attempt to write film scripts in         Hollywood, and on wages as a waiter-entertainer in Greenwich Village in         New York City.
Accomplished playwright
With the production of The Glass Menagerie Williams's fortunes changed. The play opened in Chicago,         Illinois, in December 1944 and in New York City in March; it received         the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Sidney Howard Memorial         Award. You Touched Me!, written with Donald Windham, opened on Broadway in 1945. It was followed by publication of eleven one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946), and two California productions. When A Streetcar Named Desire opened in 1947, New York audiences knew a major playwright had
Tennessee Williams.
Library of Congress
.
arrived. A Streetcar Named Desire won a Pulitzer Prize. The play combines sensuality, melodrama, and         lyrical symbolism (a poetic representation of significant things). A         film version was directed by Elia Kazan (1909–) and their         partnership lasted for more than a decade.
Although the plays that followed Streetcar never repeated its overwhelming success, they kept Williams's         name on theater marquees and in films. His novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and three volumes of short stories brought him an even wider         audience. Some writers consider Summer and Smoke (1948) Williams's most sensitive play. While The Rose Tattoo (1951) played to appreciative audiences, Camino Real (1953) played to confused ones. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) was a smashing success and won the New York Drama Critics Circle         Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
Baby Doll (an original Williams-Kazan film script, 1956) was followed by the         dramas Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958; two one-act plays, Something Unspoken and Suddenly Last Summer ), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With these plays, critics charged Williams with publicly trying         to solve personal problems, while including confused symbolism, sexual         obsessions, thin characterizations, and violence and corruption for         their own sake. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1963; also called Kingdom of Earth ), and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) neither helped Williams's standing with the critics nor         proved that Williams's remarkable talent had vanished. Published         after his death, Not about Nightingales (1998) had been written in 1938 and was Williams's first         full-length play.
Later career
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Williams continued to write for the         theater, though he was unable to repeat the success of most of his early         years. One of his last plays was Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), based on passionate love affair between the American writer F.         Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) and his wife, Zelda.
Two collections of Williams's many oneact plays were published: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946) and American Blues (1948). Williams also wrote fiction, including two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975). Four volumes of short stories were also published. One Arm and Other Stories (1948), Hard Candy (1954), The Knightly Quest (1969), and Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974). Nine of his plays were made into films, and he wrote one         original screenplay, Baby Doll (1956). In his 1975 tell-all novel, Memoirs, Williams described his own problems with alcohol and drugs and his         homosexuality (the attraction to members of the same sex).
Williams died in New York City on February 25, 1983. In 1995, the United         States Post Office commemorated Williams by issuing a special edition         stamp in his name as part of their Literary Arts Series. For several         years, literary enthusiasts have gathered to celebrate the man and his         work at the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. The annual event,         held along with the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival,         features educational, theatrical and literary programs.
For More Information