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Tennessee
Williams
Tennessee Williams
One of Americas greatest
playwrights, and certainly the greatest ever from the South, Tennessee
Williams wrote fiction and motion picture screenplays, but he is
acclaimed primarily for his playsnearly all of which are set
in the South, but which at their best rise above regionalism to
approach universal themes.
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Thomas
Lanier Williams was born in Columbus,
Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, the first son and second child of
Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Dakin Williams. His mother, the daughter
of a minister, was of genteel upbringing, while his father, a shoe
salesman, came from a prestigious Tennessee family which included
the states first governor and first senator. The family lived
for several years in Clarksdale,
Mississippi, before moving to St. Louis in 1918. At the age of 16,
he encountered his first brush with the publishing world when he
won third prize and received $5 for an essay, “Can a Good
Wife Be a Good Sport?,” in Smart Set. A year later,
he published “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in Weird
Tales. In 1929, he entered the University
of Missouri. His success there was dubious, and in 1931 he began
work for a St. Louis shoe company. It was six years later when his
first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, was produced in Memphis,
in many respects the true beginning of his literary and stage career.
Building upon the experience he
gained with his first production, Williams had two of his plays,
Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind, produced
by Mummers of St. Louis in 1937. After a brief encounter with enrollment
at Washington University, St. Louis, he entered the University of
Iowa and graduated in 1938. As the second World War loomed over
the horizon, Williams found a bit of fame when he won the Group
Theater prize of $100 for American Blues and received a $1,000
grant from the Authors League of America in 1939. Battle
of Angels was produced in Boston a year later. Near the close
of the war in 1944, what many consider to be his finest play, The
Glass Menagerie, had a very successful run in Chicago and a
year later burst its way onto Broadway. Containing autobiographical
elements from both his days in St. Louis as well as from his family’s
past in Mississippi, the play won the New York Drama Critics’
Circle award as the best play of the season. Williams, at the age
of 34, had etched an indelible mark among the public and among his
peers.
Following the critical acclaim
over The Glass Menagerie, over the next eight years he found
homes for A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose
Tattoo, and Camino Real on Broadway. Although his reputation
on Broadway continued to zenith, particularly upon receiving his
first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for Streetcar, Williams reached
a larger world-wide public in 1950 when The Glass Menagerie
and again in 1951 when A Streetcar Named Desire were made
into motion pictures. Williams had now achieved a fame few playwrights
of his day could equal.
Over the next thirty years, dividing
his time between homes in Key West, New Orleans, and New York, his
reputation continued to grow and he saw many more of his works produced
on Broadway and made into films, including such works as Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he earned a second Pulitzer Prize in
1955), Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana. There
is little doubt that as a playwright, fiction writer, poet, and
essayist, Williams helped transform the contemporary idea of the
Southern literature. However, as a Southerner he not only helped
to pave the way for other writers, but also helped the South find
a strong voice in those auspices where before it had only been heard
as a whisper. Williams died on February 24, 1983, at the Hotel Elysée
in New York City.
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Related Links & Info

First home of
Tennessee Williams in Columbus, Mississippi
Clarksdale
web site
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More biographical and critical
information about Williams at Gateway
New Orleans

The U.S. Postal Service honored
Williams on a stamp in 1994. Click on image for larger view.

Williams in Key West, 1980, by Mario Aijane; one of the photographs,
letters, manuscripts, typescripts, annotated books, miscellaneous
artworks, and ephemera acquired in 1995 by Columbia
University
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Baby Doll is one of several
Tennessee Williams movies named the 100
greatest films at Filmsite.
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