FREE ESSAY ON THOMAS LANIER WILLIAMS

THOMAS LANIER WILLIAMS

Tennessee Williams (1911 - 1983)
Thomas Lanier Williams was born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. The second of
three children, his family life was full of tension. His parents, a shoe salesman and the
daughter of a minister, often engaged in violent arguments that frightened his sister
Rose.
In 1927, Williams got his first taste of literary fame when he took third place in a
national essay contest sponsored by The Smart Set magazine. In 1929, he was admitted to
the University of Missouri where he saw a production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts and decided
to become a playwright.
But his degree was interrupted when his father forced him to withdraw from college and
work at the International Shoe Company. There he worked with a young man named Stanley
Kowalski who would later resurface as a character in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Eventually, Tom returned to school. In 1937, he had two of his plays (Candles to the Sun
and The Fugitive Kind) produced by Mummers of St. Louis, and in 1938, he graduated from
the University of Iowa. After failing to find work in Chicago, he moved to New Orleans
and changed his name from Tom to Tennessee which was the state of his father's birth.
In 1939, the young playwright received a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant, and a year later,
Battle of Angels was produced in Boston. In 1944, what many consider to be his best play,
The Glass Menagerie, had a very successful run in Chicago and a year later burst its way
onto Broadway. The play tells the story of Tom, his disabled sister, Laura, and their
controlling mother Amanda who tries to make a match between Laura and the gentleman
caller. Many people believe that Tennessee used his own familial relationships as
inspiration for the play. His own mother, who is often compared to the controlling
Amanda, allowed doctors to perform a frontal lobotomy on Tennessee's sister Rose, an
event that greatly disturbed Williams who cared for Rose throughout much of her adult
life. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams' greatests successes) said of Tennessee:
Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life. The
Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the
season.
Williams followed up his first major critical success with several other Broadway hits
including such plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose Tattoo, and
Camino Real. He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire,
and reached an even larger world-wide audience in 1950 and 1951 when The Glass Menagerie
and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into major motion pictures. Later plays which were
also made into motion pictures include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he earned a
second Pulitzer Prize in 1955), Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana.
Tennessee Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo in 1947 while living in New
Orleans. Merlo, a second generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in
World War II, was a steadying influence in Williams' chaotic life. But in 1961, Merlo
died of Lung Cancer and the playwright went into a deep depression that lasted for ten
years. In fact, Williams struggled with depression throughout most of his life and lived
with the constant fear that he would go insane as did his sister Rose. For much of this
period, he battled addictions to prescription drugs and alcohol.
On February 24, 1983, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap at his New York
City residence at the Hotel Elysee. He is buried in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition to
twenty-five full length plays, Williams produced dozens of short plays and screenplays,
two novels, a novella, sixty short stories, over one-hundred poems and an autobiography.
Among his many awards, he won two Pulitzer Prizes and four New York Drama Critics' Circle
Awards.