Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams, original name Thomas
Lanier Williams (b. March 26, 1911,
Columbus, Miss., U.S.—d. Feb. 25, 1983,
New York City), American dramatist whose
plays reveal a world of human
frustration in which sex and violence
underlie an atmosphere of romantic
gentility.
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.
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 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.
Williams also wrote two novels, The
Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and
Moise and the World of Reason (1975),
essays, poetry, film scripts, short
stories, and an autobiography, Memoirs
(1975). His works won four Drama
Critics’ awards and were widely
translated and performed around the
world.
