Tennessee Williams Biography and List of Works

One of the most prominent playwrights in the United States after World War II. After a severe mental and physical breakdown in the 1960s, Williams's plays were more or less unsuccessful. In his controversial and poetic plays Williams examines turbulent emotional and sexual forces, physical and spiritual needs, and created such unforgettable characters as Maggie in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (195) and Stanley Kowalski in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1947).

"There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand - but as a calculating bitch with 'round heels'.... Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life."
(Tennessee Williams in Elia Kazan's autobiography A Life, 1988)

Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi. His father was a travelling salesman for a shoe company and his mother the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman. He was brought up in his grandfather's home where his parents lived. The family moved to St. Louis in 1918. Williams's Deep South accent and poverty made him a target of his schoolmates and in later life earned him the nickname 'Tennessee' from his university classmates. He entered college during the great American depression. The family's lack of funds forced him to leave after a couple of years and take a job in the same shoe company that employed his father. Williams had started to write in his childhood and continued to produce short stories while still working at the factory. When his health broke down, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Memphis.

"Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation."
(from The Rose Tattoo, 1950)

As a playwright Williams began his career while studying at the University of Missouri and Washington University, St. Louis. At the age of 27 he received his B.A. from the University of Iowa, where his play SPRING STORM was presented despite the unfavourable reaction of Professor E.C. Mabie. In 1936 he wrote..."most of the literary experimentation is now being done by incompetent young nobodies like myself who have absolutely nothing to lose, no money, no reputation, no public . . . by writing any way they damned please!'' In 1939 Williams received a special commendation (and $100) awarded to playwrights under 25 - he was nearly 28 and had just started working as a shoe clerk.

"It is amazing and frightening how completely one's whole being becomes absorbed in the making of a play. It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses."
(from the foreword of Cimino Real, 1953)

During WW II years Williams worked for a short time in Hollywood writing for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film company. He's first critical triumph came in 1945 with THE GLASS MENAGERIE, which ran on Broadway for over a year and received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. His next major play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), won a Pulitzer Prize, and established him as a major American dramatist. It plots the decline and fall of a Southern woman, Blance Du Bois. The play was made into a film, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando in his breakthrough role as Stanley Kowalski. The leading lady Vivien Leigh hated Brando's slobbish behaviour on the set, which, as a Method actor, mirrored his character's behaviour.

"He's like an animal. He has animal's habits. There's even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by and there he is. Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the stone age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle."
(from A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951, dir. by Elia Kazan)

Williams received a Pulitzer Prize for CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1955), which portrays the moral decay of a Southern family, and THE NIGHT OF IGUANA (1961), filmed in 1964. Several of his plays were successfully transferred to the screen. Among Williams's own screenplays the most important was BABY DOLL (1956), directed by Elia Kazan. In the story Silva Vacarro seeks revenge and aims to seduce Archie's child bride (Carroll Baker). The Legion of Decency railed against the film, mainly for its portrayal of an unconsummated marriage. However, Baker's baby-doll pyjamas created a fashion.

"Nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof - is there? Is there, baby?"
(from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1955)

As an artist Williams used his personal past, his own alcoholism and homosexuality, and his family and friends to provide subjects and characters for his plays, stories and novels. Many of Williams's plays reflect the romantic Southern Gothic Tradition exemplified in the works Carson McCullers and William Faulkner or the sexual freedom found in the novels of D.H. Lawrence. Exceptionally Williams set the story of his novel THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (1950) in Rome. The protagonist, Mrs Stone, is recently widowed and settles in Rome where she starts an affair with the young and expensive Paolo. "Isn't it odd, said Meg, how women of our age begin all at once to look for beauty in our male partners?"

In the 1960s Williams lost his long-time companion Frank Merlo and in 1969 he spent two months on a detoxification program, designed to free him from prolonged dependency on alcohol, amphetamines, and barbiturates. From this period arose IN THE BAR OF A TOKYO HOTEL, which deals with the difficulty of creating a work of art. OUT CRY, portraying the author's self-doubt and alcoholism, was a quick failure on Broadway in 1973.

In the early 1970s Williams had regained some measure of control in his personal life. In an article published in The New York Times (May 8, 1977) he stated bitterly: "I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer, a ghost still visible, excessively solid of flesh and perhaps too ambulatory, but a writer remembered mostly for works which were staged between 1944 and 1961." However, Williams still managed to complete some of his most innovative works: THE RED DEVIL BATTERY SIGN (1976), VIEUX CARRÉ (1977), A LOVELY SUNDAY FOR CREVE COEUR (1978), and CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL (1980), a 'ghost play' about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It was a critical failure and Williams's last Broadway play during his lifetime. In the 1980s Williams gained huge success in the Soviet Union - he was called ''the biggest success since Chekhov" - with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Rose Tattoo, and other classics.

Williams's frank memoirs appeared in 1975. His final play, A HOUSE NOT MEANT TO STAND, had its premiere at the Goodman Theatre of Chicago in 1982. Williams died from asphyxiation after a heavy night of drinking on February 25, 1983.

The Glass Menagerie (first produced in 1944) - "Knowledge - Zzzzzp! Money - Zzzzzp! - Power! That's the cycle democracy is built on!" A "Memory play" in which Tom Wingfield recalls his life in St. Louis with his mother Amanda, a faded Southern belle, and his sister Laura, a withdrawn and slightly crippled girl who collects glass animal figures. Amanda's husband has long since deserted the family, but she attempts to raise her children in the social level to which she aspires. Tom has become a compulsive moviegoer. During a quarrel with his mother, Tom smashes Laura's menagerie. From the shoewarehouse in which Tom works, he brings to dinner his co-worker Jim O'Connor. Laura once knew Jim and admired him in high school, and he is charmed by Laura's sensitivity. Jim confesses that he is already engaged. Amanda is enraged with Tom for what she thinks was a deliberate practical joke. Tom runs out of the house, never to return. In a pantomime scene Amanda confronts Laura and Tom is pursued by the haunting memory of his sister. - Laura was modelled after Williams's beloved sister Rose, who spent most of her life in mental hospitals and was lobotomised.

For further reading: Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan by B. Murphy (1992); The Faces of Eve by G.R. Kataria (1992); A Streetcar Named Desire by T.P. Adler (1990); Tennessee Williams. A Study of the Short Fiction by D.P. Vannatta (1988); Tennessee Williams, ed. by H. Bloom (1987); Tennessee Williams by R. Boxill (1987); Tennessee Williams's Plays by J.J. Thompson (1987); Tennessee Williams by H. Rasky (1986); Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. by A.J. Devlin (1986); The Kindness of Strangers by D. Spoto (1985); The Glass Menagerie by R.B. Parker (1983); Tennessee Williams by F.H. Londré (1979); Tennessee Williams and Film by M. Yacowar (1977); Tennessee Williams by B. Nelson (1961)

Short story: THE VENGEANCE OF NITROCIS, (1928)