Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911.
The name given to him at
birth was Thomas Lanier Williams III. He did not acquire the nickname Tennessee until
college, when classmates began calling him that in honor of his Southern accent and his
father’s home state. The Williams family had produced several illustrious politicians in the
state of Tennessee, but Williams’s grandfather had squandered the family fortune. Williams’s
father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy drinker. Williams’s mother,
Edwina, was a Mississippi clergyman’s daughter and prone to hysterical attacks. Until
Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin,
lived with Edwina’s parents in Mississippi. After that, the family moved to St. Louis. Once
there, the family’s situation deteriorated. C.C.’s drinking increased, the family moved sixteen
times in ten years, and the young Williams, always shy and fragile, was ostracized and
taunted at school. During these years, he and Rose became extremely close. Rose, the model
for Laura in The Glass Menagerie, suffered from mental illness later in life and eventually
underwent a prefrontal lobotomy (an intensive brain surgery), an event that was extremely
upsetting for Williams.
An average student and social outcast in high school, Williams turned to the movies and
writing for solace. At sixteen, Williams won five dollars in a national competition for his
answer to the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?”; his answer was published in
Smart Set magazine. The next year, he published a horror story in a magazine called Weird
Tales, and the year after that he entered the University of Missouri as a journalism major.
While there, he wrote his first plays. Before Williams could receive his degree, however, his
father, outraged because Williams had failed a required ROTC program course, forced him to
withdraw from school and go to work at the same shoe company where he himself worked.
Williams worked at the shoe factory for three years, a job that culminated in a minor nervous
breakdown. After that, he returned to college, this time at Washington University in St.
Louis. While he was studying there, a St. Louis theater group produced his plays The
Fugitive Kind and Candles to the Sun. Personal problems led Williams to drop out of
Washington University and enroll in the University of Iowa. While he was in Iowa, his sister,
Rose, underwent a lobotomy, which left her institutionalized for the rest of her life. Despite
this trauma, Williams finally graduated in 1938. In the years that followed, he lived a
bohemian life, working menial jobs and wandering from city to city. He continued to work on
drama, however, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying playwriting at the New School in
New York. During the early years of World War II, Williams worked in Hollywood as a
scriptwriter.
Around 1941, Williams began the work that would become The Glass Menagerie. The play
evolved from a short story entitled “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” which focused more
completely on Laura than the play does. In December of 1944, The Glass Menagerie was
staged in Chicago, with the collaboration of a number of well-known theatrical figures. When
the play first opened, the audience was sparse, but the Chicago critics raved about it, and
eventually it was playing to full houses. In March of 1945, the play moved to Broadway,
where it won the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. This highly personal,
explicitly autobiographical play earned Williams fame, fortune, and critical respect, and it
marked the beginning of a successful run that would last for another ten years. Two years
after The Glass Menagerie, Williams won another Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a
Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams won the same two prizes again in
1955, for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The impact of success on Williams’s life was colossal and, in his estimation, far from
positive. In an essay entitled “The Catastrophe of Success,” he outlines, with both light
humor and a heavy sense of loss, the dangers that fame poses for an artist. For years after he
became a household name, Williams continued to mine his own experiences to create pathos-
laden works. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness in search of purpose, and
insanity were all part of Williams’s world. Since the early 1940s, he had been a known
homosexual, and his experiences in an era and culture unfriendly to homosexuality certainly
affected his work. After 1955, Williams began using drugs, and he would later refer to the
1960s as his “stoned age.” He suffered a period of intense depression after the death of his
longtime partner in 1961 and, six years later, entered a psychiatric hospital in St. Louis. He
continued to write nonetheless, though most critics agree that the quality of his work
diminished in his later life. His life’s work adds up to twenty-five full-length plays, five
screenplays, over seventy one-act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a
memoir; five of his plays were also made into movies. Williams died from choking in a drug-
related incident in 1983.
