Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known
by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright. Along with
contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three
foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
After years of obscurity, at age 33 he became suddenly famous with the
success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected
his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes,
including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet
Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he
attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar
Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the
20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur
Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema.
He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four
years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of
Fame.

Childhood
Thomas Lanier Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi of English,
Welsh, and Huguenot ancestry, the second child of Edwina Dakin (August 9, 1884 –
June 1, 1980) and Cornelius Coffin C. C. Williams (August 21, 1879 – March 27,
1957). His father was a traveling shoe salesman who became alcoholic and was
frequently away from home. His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of Rose O. Dakin,
a music teacher, and the Reverend Walter Dakin, an Episcopal priest from Illinois
who was assigned to a parish in Clarksdale, Mississippi, shortly after Williams' birth.
Williams lived in his parsonage with his family for much of his early childhood and
was close to his grandparents.
He had two siblings, older sister Rose Isabel Williams (1909–1996) and
younger brother Walter Dakin Williams. (1919 – 2008).
As a young child Williams nearly died from a case of diphtheria that left him
weak and virtually confined to his house during a period of recuperation that lasted a
year. At least in part as a result of his illness, he was less robust as a child than his
father wished. Cornelius Williams, a descendant of hearty East Tennessee pioneer
stock, had a violent temper and was a man prone to use his fists. He regarded what

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he thought was his son's effeminacy with disdain. Edwina, locked in an unhappy
marriage, focused her attention almost entirely on her frail young son. Many critics
and historians note that Williams drew from his own dysfunctional family in much of
his writing.
When Williams was eight years old, his father was promoted to a job at the
home office of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother's
continual search for what she considered to be an appropriate address, as well as his
father's heavy drinking and loudly turbulent behavior, caused them to move
numerous times around St. Louis. Williams attended Soldan High School, a setting
he referred to in his play The Glass Menagerie. Later he studied at University City
High School.
At age 16, Williams won third prize for an essay published in Smart Set, titled
"Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" A year later, his short story "The Vengeance of
Nitocris" was published in the August 1928 issue of the magazine Weird Tales. That
same year he first visited Europe with his maternal grandfather Dakin.

Education

From 1929 to 1931, Williams attended the University of

Missouri in Columbia where he enrolled in journalism classes. He was bored by his
classes and distracted by unrequited love for a girl. Soon he began entering his
poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests, hoping to earn extra income.
His first submitted play was Beauty Is the Word (1930), followed by Hot Milk at Three
in the Morning (1932). As recognition for Beauty, a play about rebellion against
religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a
writing competition.
At University of Missouri, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but
he did not fit in well with his fraternity brothers. After he failed a military training
course in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at the
International Shoe Company factory. Although Williams hated the monotony, the job
forced him out of the gentility of his upbringing.
His dislike of his new 9 - to - 5 routine drove Williams to write prodigiously. He
set a goal of writing one story a week. Williams often worked on weekends and late
into the night. His mother recalled his intensity:
„Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the
typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house. Some mornings when I walked in
to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too
tired to remove his clothes”.
Overworked, unhappy, and lacking further success with his writing, by his 24th
birthday Williams had suffered a nervous breakdown and left his job. He drew from
memories of this period, and a particular factory co-worker, to create the
character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
By the mid - 1930s his mother separated from his father due to his worsening
alcoholism and abusive temper. They never divorced.

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 In 1936, Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis where he
wrote the play Me, Vashya (1937). In the autumn of 1937, he transferred to
the University of Iowa, where he graduated with a B.A. in English in August 1938.
He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City.
Speaking of his early days as a playwright and an early collaborative play
called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!, Williams wrote, "The laughter ... enchanted me.
Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's
the only thing that saved my life."
Around 1939, he adopted "Tennessee Williams" as his professional name.

Literary influences

Williams' writings reference some of the poets and writers he most admired in
his early years: Hart Crane, Arthur Rimbaud, Anton Chekhov (from the age of
ten), William Shakespeare, Clarence Darrow, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine
Mansfield, August Strindberg, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Emily
Dickinson, William Inge, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway.

Carrer

Williams became interested in playwriting while at the University of

Missouri (Columbia) and Washington University (St. Louis) and worked at it even
during the Depression while employed in a St. Louis shoe factory. Little
theatre groups produced some of his work, encouraging him to study dramatic writing
at the University of Iowa, where he earned a B.A. in 1938.
His first recognition came when American Blues (1939), a group of one-act
plays, won a Group Theatre award.
Williams, however, continued to work at jobs ranging from theatre usher to Hollywood
scriptwriter until success came with The Glass Menagerie (1944). In it, Williams
portrayed a declassed Southern family living in a tenement. The play is about the
failure of a domineering mother, Amanda, living upon her delusions of a romantic
past, and her cynical son, Tom, to secure a suitor for Tom’s crippled and painfully shy
sister, Laura, who lives in a fantasy world with a collection of glass animals.
Williams’ next major play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), won a Pulitzer
Prize. It is a study of the mental and moral ruin of Blanche Du Bois, another former
Southern belle, whose genteel pretensions are no match for the harsh realities
symbolized by her brutish brother - in - law, Stanley Kowalski.
Williams compounded by years of addiction to sleeping pills and liquor,
problems that he struggled to overcome after a severe mental and physical
breakdown in 1969.
His later plays were unsuccessful, closing soon to poor reviews. They
include Vieux Carré (1977), about down-and-outs in New Orleans; A Lovely Sunday
for Crève Coeur (1978–79), about a fading belle in St. Louis during the Great
Depression; and Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), centring on Zelda Fitzgerald,
wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on the people they knew.

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 During all of this time, Tennessee had been winning small prizes for various
types of writing, but nothing significant had yet been written. After his rest in
Memphis, he returned to the university (Washington University in St. Louis), where he
became associated with a writers' group. Here he wrote and had some of his earlier
works produced.

He later attended the State University of Iowa and wrote two long plays for a
creative writing seminar. After leaving Iowa, he drifted around the country, picking up
odd jobs and collecting experiences until he received a Rockefeller Fellowship in
1940. He spent his time writing until the money was exhausted and then he worked
again at odd jobs until his first great success with The Glass Menagerie in 1944-45.

Williams has used his early life in most of his plays. His favorite setting is
southern, with southern characters. In Stanley Kowalski, we see many of the rough,
poker-playing, manly qualities that his own father possessed. In Laura and Amanda,
we find very close echoes to his own mother and sister. In Tom Wingfield, we find
again the struggles and aspirations of the writer himself re-echoed in literary form.
Thus he has objectified his own subjective experiences in his literary works.

As Williams was struggling to gain production and an audience for his work in
the late 1930s, he worked at a string of menial jobs that included a stint as caretaker
on a chicken ranch in Laguna Beach, California. In 1939, with the help of his
agent Audrey Wood, Williams was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation in recognition of his play Battle of Angels. It was produced in Boston in
1940 and was poorly received.

Using some of the Rockefeller funds, Williams moved to New Orleans in 1939
to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program
begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt created to put people to work.
Williams lived for a time in New Orleans' French Quarter, including 722
Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré. The building is now part
of The Historic New Orleans Collection. The Rockefeller grant brought him to the
attention of the Hollywood film industry and Williams received a six-month contract as
a writer from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio, earning $250 weekly.
During the winter of 1944-1945, his memory play The Glass
Menagerie developed from his 1943 short story "Portrait of a Girl in Glass", was
produced in Chicago and garnered good reviews. It moved to New York where it
became an instant hit and enjoyed a long Broadway run. Elia Kazan (who directed
many of Williams' greatest successes) said of Williams: "Everything in his life is in his
plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." The Glass Menagerie won the award
for the best play of the season, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.
The huge success of his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, secured his
reputation as a great playwright in 1947. During the late 1940s and 1950s, Williams
began to travel widely with his partner Frank Merlo (1922 – September 21, 1963),
often spending summers in Europe. He moved often to stimulate his writing, living in
New York, New Orleans, Key West, Rome, Barcelona, and London. Williams wrote,
"Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some
startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.

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 Between 1948 and 1959 Williams had seven of his plays produced on
Broadway: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino
Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden
District (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959, he had earned two Pulitzer
Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and
a Tony Award.
In 1953, Camino Real, a complex work set in a mythical, microcosmic town
whose inhabitants include Lord Byron and Don Quixote, was a commercial failure,
but his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which exposes the emotional lies governing
relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter, was awarded a Pulitzer
Prize and was successfully filmed, as was The Night of the Iguana (1961), the story
of a defrocked minister turned sleazy tour guide, who finds God in a cheap Mexican
hotel. Suddenly Last Summer (1958) deals with lobotomy, pederasty, and
cannibalism, and in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), the gigolo hero is castrated for
having infected a Southern politician’s daughter with venereal disease.
Williams' work reached wide audiences in the early 1950s when The Glass
Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were adapted as motion pictures. Later
plays also adapted for the screen included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose
Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana, Sweet Bird of Youth,
and Summer and Smoke. Williams was in ill health frequently during the
1960s, compounded by years of addiction to sleeping pills and liquor, problems that
he struggled to overcome after a severe mental and physical breakdown in 1969.
His later plays were unsuccessful, closing soon to poor reviews. They
include Vieux Carré (1977), about down-and-outs in New Orleans; A Lovely Sunday
for Crève Coeur (1978–79), about a fading belle in St. Louis during the Great
Depression; and Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), centring on Zelda Fitzgerald,
wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on the people they knew.
After the extraordinary successes of the 1940s and 1950s, he had more
personal turmoil and theatrical failures in the 1960s and 1970s. Although he
continued to write every day, the quality of his work suffered from his increasing
alcohol and drug consumption, as well as occasional poor choices of collaborators. In
1963, his partner Frank Merlo died.
Consumed by depression over the loss, and in and out of treatment facilities while
under the control of his mother and brother Dakin, Williams spiraled downward.
His plays Kingdom of Earth (1967), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small
Craft Warnings (1973), The Two Character Play (also called Out Cry, 1973), The Red
Devil Battery Sign (1976), Vieux Carré (1978), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980),
and others were all box office failures. Negative press notices wore down his spirit.
His last play, A House Not Meant to Stand, was produced in Chicago in 1982.
Despite largely positive reviews, it ran for only 40 performances.
Critics and audiences alike failed to appreciate Williams' new style and the
approach to theater he developed during the 1970s.
In 1974, Williams received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis
University Library Associates.
In 1979, four years before his death, he was inducted into the American
Theater Hall of Fame.

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Personal life
Throughout his life Williams remained close to his sister, Rose, who was
diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman. In 1943, as her behavior became
increasingly disturbing, she was subjected to a lobotomy, requiring her to be
institutionalized for the rest of her life. As soon as he was financially able, Williams
moved Rose to a private institution just north of New York City, where he often visited
her. He gave her a percentage interest in several of his most successful plays, the
royalties from which were applied toward her care.
The devastating effects of Rose's treatment may have contributed to Williams'
alcoholism and his dependence on various combinations
of amphetamines and barbiturates.
After some early attempts at relationships with women, by the late 1930s
Williams began exploring his homosexuality. In New York City, he joined a gay social
circle that included fellow writer and close friend Donald Windham (1920–2010) and
his boyfriend Fred Melton. In the summer of 1940, Williams initiated a relationship
with Kip Kiernan (1918–1944), a young Canadian dancer he met in Provincetown,
Massachusetts. When Kiernan left him to marry a woman, Williams was distraught.
Kiernan's death four years later at age 26 was another heavy blow.
On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico, Williams met Pancho Rodríguez y
González, a hotel clerk of Mexican heritage. Rodríguez was, by all accounts, a loving
and loyal companion. But he was also prone to jealous rages and excessive drinking,
and their relationship was tempestuous. In February 1946 Rodríguez left New Mexico
to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment. They lived and traveled together until
late 1947, when Williams ended the relationship. Rodríguez and Williams remained
friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s.
Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of an
Italian teenager, called "Rafaello" in Williams' Memoirs. He provided financial
assistance to the younger man for several years afterward. Williams drew from this
for his first novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.
When he returned to New York that spring, Williams met and fell in love with
Frank Merlo (1922–1963). An occasional actor of Sicilian ancestry, he had served in
the U.S. Navy in World War II. This was the enduring romantic relationship of
Williams' life, and it lasted 14 years until infidelities and drug abuse on both sides
ended it. Merlo, who had become Williams' personal secretary, took on most of the
details of their domestic life. He provided a period of happiness and stability, acting
as a balance to the playwright's frequent bouts with depression.
Williams feared that, like his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity. His years
with Merlo, in an apartment in Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida
were Williams' happiest and most productive. Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was
diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Williams returned to him and cared for him
until his death on September 20, 1963.
In the years following Merlo's death, Williams descended into a period of nearly
catatonic depression and increasing drug use; this resulted in several hospitalizations
and commitments to mental health facilities. He submitted to injections by Dr. Max

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Jacobson – known popularly as Dr. Feelgood – who used increasing amounts of
amphetamines to overcome his depression. Jacobson combined these with
prescriptions for the sedative Seconal to relieve his insomnia.
During this time, influenced by his mother, a Roman Catholic convert, Williams joined
the Catholic Church (though he later claimed that he never took his conversion
seriously). He was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely
overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.
Edwina Dakin died in 1980 at the age of 95. Her health had begun failing during
the early 1970s and she lived in a care facility from 1975 onward. Williams rarely saw
his mother in her later years and retained a strong animosity toward her; friends
described his reaction to her death as "mixed".
As Williams grew older, he felt increasingly alone; he feared old age and losing
his sexual appeal to younger gay men. In the 1970s, when he was in his 60s,
Williams had a lengthy relationship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam veteran and
aspiring writer in his 20s. Williams had deep affection for Carroll and respect for what
he saw as the younger man's talents. Along with Williams' sister Rose, Carroll was
one of the two people who received a bequest in Williams' will.
Williams described Carroll's behavior as a combination of "sweetness" and
"beastliness". Because Carroll had a drug problem (as did Williams), friends such
as Maria St. Just saw the relationship as "destructive". Williams wrote that Carroll
played on his "acute loneliness" as an aging gay man. When the two men broke up in
1979, Williams called Carroll a "twerp", but they remained friends until Williams died
four years later.

Death
On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead at age 71 in his suite at the
Hotel Elysée in New York. Chief Medical Examiner of New York City Elliot M.
Gross reported that Williams had choked to death from inhaling the plastic cap of a
bottle of the type that might contain a nasal spray or eye solution.
He wrote in his will in 1972:
„ I, Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams, being in sound mind upon this subject, and
having declared this wish repeatedly to my close friends-do hereby state my desire to
be buried at sea. More specifically, I wish to be buried at sea at as close a possible
point as the American poet Hart Crane died by choice in the sea; this would be
ascrnatible [sic], this geographic point, by the various books (biographical) upon his
life and death. I wish to be sewn up in a canvas sack and dropped overboard, as
stated above, as close as possible to where Hart Crane was given by himself to the
great mother of life which is the sea: the Caribbean, specifically, if that fits the
geography of his death. Otherwise - whereever fits it.”
But his brother Dakin Williams arranged for him to be buried at Calvary
Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, where his mother is buried.
Williams left his literary rights to The University of the South in Sewanee,
Tennessee, an Episcopal school, in honor of his maternal grandfather, Walter Dakin,
an alumnus of the university. The funds support a creative writing program. When
Rose died in 1996 after many years in a mental institution, she bequeathed $7 million
from her part of the Williams estate to The University of the South.

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Posthumous recognition

From February 1 to July 21, 2011, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of

his birth, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the home of
Williams' archive, exhibited 250 of his personal items.
The exhibit, titled "Becoming Tennessee Williams," included a collection of Williams
manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and artwork. The Ransom Center holds
the earliest and largest collections of Williams' papers, including all of his earliest
manuscripts, the papers of his mother Edwina Williams, and those of his long-time
agent Audrey Wood.
In late 2009, Williams was inducted into the Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of
Saint John the Divine in New York. Performers and artists who took part in his
induction included Vanessa Redgrave, playwright John Guare, Eli Wallach, Sylvia
Miles, Gregory Mosher, and Ben Griessmeyer.
The Tennessee Williams Theatre in Key West, Florida, is named for him. The
Tennessee Williams Key West Exhibit on Truman Avenue houses rare Williams
memorabilia, photographs, and pictures including his famous typewriter.
At the time of his death, Williams had been working on a final play In Masks
Outrageous and Austere, which attempted to reconcile certain forces and facts of his
own life. This was a continuing theme in his work. As of September 2007,
author Gore Vidal was completing the play, and Peter Bogdanovich was slated to
direct its Broadway debut. The play received its world premiere in New York City in
April 2012, directed by David Schweizer and starring Shirley Knight as Babe.
The rectory of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Columbus, Mississippi, where
Williams's grandfather Dakin was rector at the time of Williams's birth, was moved to
another location in 1993 for preservation. It was newly renovated in 2010 for use by
the City of Columbus as the Tennessee Williams Welcome Center.
Williams's literary legacy is represented by the literary agency headed
by Georges Borchardt.
In 1985, French author-composer Michel Berger wrote a song dedicated to
Tennessee Williams, "Quelque chose de Tennessee" (Something of Tennessee),
for Johnny Hallyday. It became one of the singer's more famous songs.
Since 1986, the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival has been
held annually in New Orleans, Louisiana, in commemoration of the playwright. The
festival takes place at the end of March to coincide with Williams's birthday.
The Tennessee Williams Songbook is a one woman show written and directed
by David Kaplan, a Williams scholar and curator of Provincetown's Tennessee
Williams Festival, and starring Tony Award nominated actress Alison Fraser. The
show features songs taken from plays of Williams' canon, woven together with text to
create a new narrative. The show premiered at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans
Literary Festival. The show was recorded on CD and distributed by Ghostlight
Records.

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 In 2014 Williams was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor
Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people
who have "made significant contributions in their fields."
In 2015, The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans was
founded by Co-Artistic Directors Nick Shackleford and Augustin J Correro. The New
Orleans based non-profit theatre company is the first year-round professional theatre
company that focuses exclusively on the works of Williams.
Since 2016, St. Louis, Missouri has held an annual Tennessee Williams' Festival,
featuring a main production and related events such as literary discussions and new
plays inspired by his work. In 2018 the festival produced A Streetcar Named Desire.
The U.S. Postal Service honored Williams on a stamp in 1994 as part of its literary
arts series.
Williams is honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Works
Characters in his plays are often seen as representations of his family
members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was understood to be modeled
on his sister Rose. Some biographers believed that the character of Blanche
Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire also is based on her.
Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie generally was taken to represent
Williams' mother Edwina. Characters such as Tom Wingfield in The Glass
Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer were understood to represent
Williams himself. In addition, he used a lobotomy as a motif in Suddenly, Last
Summer.
The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to A Streetcar Named Desire in
1948 and to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. These two plays later were adapted as
highly successful films by noted directors Elia Kazan (Streetcar), with whom Williams
developed a very close artistic relationship, and Richard Brooks (Cat). Both plays
included references to elements of Williams's life such as homosexuality, mental
instability, and alcoholism.
Although The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets was the preferred choice of
the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was at first considered the
weakest of the five shortlisted nominees, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., chairman of the Board,
had seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and thought it worthy of the drama prize. The Board
went along with him after considerable discussion.
Williams wrote The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer when he
was 29, and worked on it sporadically throughout his life. A semi-autobiographical
depiction of his 1940 romance with Kip Kiernan in Provincetown, Massachusetts, it
was produced for the first time on October 1, 2006, in Provincetown by the
Shakespeare on the Cape production company. This was part of the First Annual
Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.
His last play went through many drafts as he was trying to reconcile what
would be the end of his life. There are many versions of it, but it is referred to as In
Masks Outrageous and Austere.
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 Tennessee Williams' plays are still controversial. There are many critics who
call his works sensational and shocking, but his plays have attracted the widest
audience of any living American dramatist, and he is established as America's most
important dramatist.
He left behind an impressive body of work, including plays that continue to be
performed the world over. In his worst work, his writing is melodramatic and
overwrought, but at his best Tennessee Williams is a haunting, lyrical, and powerful
voice, and one of the most important forces in twentieth-century American drama.

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