Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, and died on February 25, 1983. An American playwright and screenwriter, he belongs to the central group of 20th-century American drama, alongside Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. His professional name, adopted around 1939, acknowledged both his Southern roots and his Southern accent.

Williams wrote his first play, Beauty Is the Word, in 1930, while studying at the University of Missouri. Recognition came slowly. He wrote poetry, essays, stories, and plays, entered contests, and worked menial jobs while trying to find an audience. His breakthrough arrived in 1944 with The Glass Menagerie. The success was followed by A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959, and The Night of the Iguana in 1961. A Streetcar Named Desire is often placed on short lists of the finest American plays of the century.

The roots of his writing were personal and exacting. Williams grew up in a strained family. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a traveling shoe salesman who drank heavily, was often away, and had a violent temper. His mother, Edwina, was locked in an unhappy marriage and focused much of her attention on her frail son. As a child, Williams nearly died of diphtheria and spent about a year in recovery, short, weak, and largely confined to the house. Critics and historians agree that he drew from his dysfunctional family in much of his writing, and that his wish to break free from a puritan upbringing helped push him toward the page.

St. Louis also shaped him. When Williams was eight, his father’s job moved the family there, and frequent moves, heavy drinking, and turbulent behavior marked those years. He attended Soldan High School, later used as a setting in The Glass Menagerie. After leaving the University of Missouri, he was put to work by his father at the International Shoe Company factory. Williams hated the monotonous 9-to-5 routine, but it drove him to write intensely, often late at night and on weekends. Memories of that period, including a factory co-worker, contributed to the character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.

His education continued in uneven steps: Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Iowa, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1938, and later the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City. He admired writers and poets including Hart Crane, Arthur Rimbaud, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, August Strindberg, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, and others. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays, and memoirs, and much of his work was adapted to film. In 1979, four years before his death, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. His words still carry weight because they came from pressure, fear, longing, family conflict, and the stubborn act of writing through it all.