918 Union Boulevard St. Louis, MO 63107-2003 United States
Soldan International Studies High School (also known as Soldan High School), where Williams was educated.
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
7401 Balson Avenue University City, MO 63130 United States
University City High School (Missouri), where Williams was educated.
College/University
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
Williams as a student of the University of Missouri in 1930.
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
Neff Hall, Columbia, MO 65201, United States
The Missouri School of Journalism, at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where Williams was educated in 1929 - 1931.
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
1 Brookings Dr, St. Louis, MO 63130, United States
In 1936, Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis and spent a year there.
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
Williams received a bachelor of arts degree from the State University of Iowa in 1938.
Career
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1947
Tennessee Williams on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire.
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1948
Picture of an American Genius From LIFE Magazine
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
1948
Tennessee Williams
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
1948
Tennessee Williams at a diner in New York.
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1951
Tennessee Williams by Irving Penn, for Vogue.
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1953
Williams arriving at funeral services for Dylan Thomas, 1953
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1955
Tennessee Williams
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
1955
Tennessee Williams in New York.
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1960
Marlon Brando, Maureen Stapleton, and Tennessee Williams in The Fugitive Kind
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1963
Tennessee Williams in Mexico during filming of a movie from his play, The Night of the Iguana.
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1967
Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams
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1967
Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan
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1971
Tennessee Williams
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1975
Tennessee Williams
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1980
Tennessee Williams in New York City, New York. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
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1981
Tennessee Williams attends Kennedy Center Honors Reception Dinner on December 6, 1981 at the State Department in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella)
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1982
Tennessee Williams at the house he owned in Key West shortly before his death. (Photo by Derek Hudson)
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Tennessee Williams
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"Suddenly, Last Summer" (Premiere Party at Chasen's) Laurence Harvey, Tennessee Williams
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
"Suddenly, Last Summer" (Premiere) Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor, Tennessee Williams
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
"Suddenly, Last Summer" (Premiere) Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor, Tennessee Williams
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Burt Lancaster, James Wong Howe, and Tennessee Williams
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Tennessee Williams
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
Caption from LIFE. Backstage poker with the musicians
Gallery of Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Achievements
The 1951 film adaptation of a play "A Streetcar Named Desire" with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando.
Membership
Awards
Pulitzer Prize
Williams received Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).
Tony Award
Williams received Tony Award for The Rose Tattoo (1952), for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and for The Night of the Iguana (1961).
Presidential Medal of Freedom
In 1980 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.
Tennessee Williams attends Kennedy Center Honors Reception Dinner on December 6, 1981 at the State Department in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella)
(The drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often regarded as a...)
The drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often regarded as among the finest plays of the 20th century, and is considered by many to be Williams' greatest work.
(Set in the "plantation home in the Mississippi Delta" of ...)
Set in the "plantation home in the Mississippi Delta" of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy's family, primarily between his son Brick and Maggie the "Cat", Brick's wife.
(For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late ...)
For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves this story.
(Tennessee Williams's explosive, often violent, plays shat...)
Tennessee Williams's explosive, often violent, plays shattered conventional proprieties and transformed the American stage. They inspired some of the most famous productions and performances in theatrical and film history, and they continue to grip audiences all over the world.
(Exploring human passion with daring and unflinching hones...)
Exploring human passion with daring and unflinching honesty, Tennessee Williams forged a poetic theater of raw psychological insight that fused realism and expressionism.
(Gathering thirty-two works written from the 1930s to the ...)
Gathering thirty-two works written from the 1930s to the 1980s, this collection contains all the essential dramatic works of the playwright who transformed the American stage.
(This anthology contains four of the Pulitzer Prize-winnin...)
This anthology contains four of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's most brilliant works: Summer and Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer and Period of Adjustment.
Tennessee Williams, a dramatist and fiction writer, was one of America's major mid-20th-century playwrights, along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. He is best known for his plays A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending and Sweet Bird of Youth.
Background
Ethnicity:
Williams was of English, Welsh, and Huguenot ancestry.
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, United States; the second child of Edwina Dakin and Cornelius Coffin "C. C." Williams. His father was a traveling salesman, and for many years the family lived with his mother's parents. His parents were resentful of each other, his mother once described her husband as "a man's man" who loved to gamble and drink. When Williams was about 13, they moved to a crowded tenement in St. Louis, Missouri. Williams had two siblings, sister Rose Isabel Williams and brother Walter Dakin Williams.
Education
Williams attended Soldan High School. Later he studied at University City High School. At the age of 16, he published his first story. The next year he entered the University of Missouri, in journalism classes, but left before taking a degree. At the University of Missouri, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not fit in well with his fraternity brothers.
He then worked for two years for a shoe company. His dislike of his new nine-to-five routine drove him to write even more than before. In 1936, Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis and spent a year there (his first plays were produced during that time), and earned a bachelor of arts degree from the State University of Iowa in 1938, the year he published his first short story under his literary name. He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City.
The author’s 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. In 1940 the Theatre Guild produced Williams' Battle of Angels in Boston. The play was a total failure and was withdrawn after Boston's Watch and Ward Society banned it. Between 1940 and 1945 he lived on grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, on income derived from an attempt to write film scripts in Hollywood, and on wages as a waiter-entertainer in Greenwich Village.
With the production of The Glass Menagerie Williams' fortunes changed. The play opened in Chicago in December 1944 and in New York in March. You Touched Me!, written in collaboration with Donald Windham, opened on Broadway in 1945. It was followed by the publication of 11 one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946), and two California productions.
When A Streetcar Named Desire opened in 1947, New York audiences knew a major playwright had arrived. The play combines sensuality, melodrama, and lyrical symbolism. A film version was directed by Elia Kazan; their partnership lasted for more than a decade. Although the plays that followed Streetcar never repeated its phenomenal success, they kept Williams's name on theater marquees and films.
His novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and three volumes of short stories brought him an even wider audience. Some writers consider Summer and Smoke (1948) Williams's most sensitive play. The Rose Tattoo (1951) played to appreciative audiences, Camino Real (1953) to confused ones. In 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof appeared. Baby Doll (an original Williams-Kazan film script, 1956) was followed by the dramas Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958; two one-act plays, Something Unspoken and Suddenly Last Summer), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With these plays, critics charged Williams with public exorcism of private neuroses, confused symbolism, sexual obsessions, thin characterizations, and violence and corruption for their own sake. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1963; also called Kingdom of Earth), and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) neither exonerated him of these charges nor proved that Williams's remarkable talent had vanished.
Through the 1970’s and 1980’s, Williams continued to write for the theater, though he was unable to repeat the success of most of his early years. One of his last plays was Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), based on the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. Two collections of Williams's many one-act plays were published: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946) and American Blues (1948).
Williams also wrote fiction, including two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975). Four volumes of short stories were also published. One Arm and Other Stories (1948), Hard Candy (1954), The Knightly Quest (1969), and Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974).
Nine of his plays were made into films, and he wrote one original screenplay, Baby Doll (1956). In his 1975 tell-all novel, Memoirs, Williams described his own problems with alcohol and drugs and his homosexuality.
Williams remained an implicitly political writer up to and including Orpheus Descending, first performed in 1957, and his subject was America in the biggest, most political sense. His play Camino Real is a vivid metaphor for 1950s America. the play was a direct and passionate response to an America where, as Williams said, "the spring of humanity had gone dry"; the fascist demagoguery of Senator McCarthy was all-pervasive.
Williams was also among the first to protest at the withdrawal of Miller's passport by the US state department.
Views
The author’s main theme is the conflict between mind and body, sensual impulse at war with a longing for spiritual transcendence. Typically, his male and female characters are locked in elemental combats in which sex is, varyingly, a compulsion, an impurity, or a possible route to salvation.
In his later work Williams was less concerned with creating accessible sexual allegories than with exploring the artist's connections to his art.
Quotations:
"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."
"He loves the light! See how the light shines through him? I shouldn't be partial, but he is my favorite one." [on Marlon Brando]
"A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages."
"Eli Wallach has discovered the secret of pissing people off. He's happy."
"I was always falling down, and I would always say, 'I'm about to fall down', and almost nobody ever caught me." [on alcoholic episodes in his later years]
"To feel some humiliation and a great deal of sorrow at times is inevitable. But feeling guilty is foolish. I am a deeper and warmer and kinder man for my deviation. More conscious of need in others, and what power I have to express the human heart must be in large part due to this circumstance." [on public acknowledgment of his homosexuality]
"Being successful, and famous makes such demands! I wanted it and still want it with one part of me, but that isn't the part of me that is important or creative."
"Nobody sees anybody truly. Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos, the corresponding distortions in the eyes of the others - and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other."
"I've gone from good reviews, to bad reviews, to no reviews."
"I don't understand my life, past or present, nor do I understand life itself. Death seems more comprehensible to me."
Personality
Williams spent much of his most prolific years in Rome, Italy, and his enduring friendship with Italian stage and screen legend Anna Magnani lasted 24 years and inspired both "The Rose Tattoo" and "Orpheus Descending".
Tennessee was also close to his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia after accusing her father of making sexual advances towards her. Rose was institutionalized, eventually spending most of her life in mental institutions. Cornelius and Edwina Williams permitted Rose to received a prefrontal lobotomy, which was performed in 1937 and which incapacitated her. Tennessee Williams was haunted by his sister's tragedy for the rest of his life, and never forgave his parents for authorizing the operation.
Physical Characteristics:
As a child, Williams was afflicted with paralysis, which affected him between the ages of five and seven, turning him into an invalid for two years.
The author suffered from depression through his entire adult life, and feared going mad. He was briefly institutionalized in 1969 after a severe nervous breakdown, and never forgave his younger brother Dakin for allowing him to be put into a madhouse, which was a nightmare, according to his 1975 memoir. Part of Williams' problem, aside from his alcoholism, was that in the 1960s, he had become addicted to prescription drugs.
Interests
Writers
Hart Crane, Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, August Strindberg, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Emily Dickinson William Inge, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway
Connections
During his life Williams had relationships with several men. In the summer of 1940, Williams initiated an affair with Kip Kiernan, a young Canadian dancer, but the latter left Williams to marry a woman. In 1945 Williams met Pancho Rodríguez y González, a Mexican clerk. Williams ended the affair in 1947 and spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of an Italian teenager, called "Rafaello" in Williams' Memoirs.
Tennessee Williams met long-term partner Frank Merlo in the summer of 1948 (Merlo died of lung cancer in the fall of 1963). Though separated briefly in 1961 and again in 1962, the two were partners for 15 years. Merlo acted as his personal manager.
Father:
Cornelius Coffin "C. C." Williams
Mother:
Edwina Dakin
Sister:
Rose Isabel Williams
Brother:
Walter Dakin Williams
Partner:
Frank Merlo
Partner:
Pancho Rodríguez y González
Partner:
Kip Kiernan
Friend:
Donald Windham
Friend:
Anna Magnani
References
Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience
In this frank, compelling study, the distinguished biographer and critic Ronald Hayman explores the intersection of biography and art in one of the most exuberantly autobiographical dramatists of the American theater.
1994
Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog
An extraordinary book; one that almost magically makes clear how Tennessee Williams wrote; how he came to his visions of Amanda Wingfield, his Blanche DuBois, Stella Kowalski, Alma Winemiller, Lady Torrance, and the other characters of his plays that transformed the American theater of the mid-twentieth century.
2015
The Kindness Of Strangers: The Life Of Tennessee Williams
Award-winning biographer Donald Spoto gives us not only a full and accurate account of Williams's life, he also reveals the intimate connections between the playwright's personal dramas and his remarkably autobiographical art.
1997
Tennessee Williams in Provincetown
Tennesse Williams in Provincetown is the story of Tennesse Williams' four summer seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts: 1940, '41, '44 and '47.
2006
Tennessee Williams
In this gripping new biography, Paul Ibell looks at Williams as a poet, playwright, brother, homosexual, alcoholic, drug addict, and, ultimately, a deeply passionate soul whose operatically intense plays were a vibrant reflection of life.
2016
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself.
Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams
Tom is Lyle Leverich's definitive account based on his exclusive access to letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts, and family documents of Williams's early life and of the events that shaped this most autobiographical of dramatists.