Tennessee Williams Biography

Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Context
Who was Tennessee Williams?
Thomas Lanier Williams was born on 26 March 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi (the nickname ‘Tennessee’ was given to him later at college by a fellow student ignorant of the geography of the Southern American states, who confused Mississippi – where Williams was born – with Tennessee). His father, Cornelius Coffin (C.C.) Williams, was then an employee of a telephone company and a heavy drinker, and his mother Edwina, a typical spoilt, impractical Southern belle, was the daughter of a highly respected Episcopalian rector. Until Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin, lived with Edwina’s parents in Mississippi.
In 1919, the Williams family moved to St. Louis, marking the start of the family’s deterioration. C.C.’s drinking increased and tensions between husband and wife worsened. At this time Rose’s behaviour also gave cause for concern. Williams suffered much during this period from the unhappiness he was experiencing at home, yet he found solace in reading and later in writing.
In 1929 Williams’ grandparents’ generosity enabled him to become a student at the University of Missouri, at Columbia. Despite not being distinguished academically, he nonetheless profited greatly from his three years there. He read voraciously (in particular the modern European dramatists – Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg. Henrik Ibsen) and began to make a name for himself as a writer.

The Great Depression (1930) put an end to his studies, and in 1931 Williams became a clerk in the shoe firm employing his father. This was a miserable time for Williams during which he suffered a nervous breakdown. He then returned to college at Washington University in St. Louis. While he was studying there, a St. Louis theatre group produced two of his plays, The Fugitive Kind and Candles to the Sun. However further personal problems led Williams to drop out of Washington University and enrol in the University of Iowa. While he was in Iowa, Rose, who had become quite mentally unstable, accused her father of attacking her. The sexual element in her fancies spelt scandal and so alarmed her mother that she agreed for a pre-frontal lobotomy to be performed on her daughter in 1937. Rose was left institutionalised for the rest of her life following the operation. Tennessee Williams was at University at this time and he never ceased to reproach himself for not having been there to try to prevent the operation on his sister. Nor could he forgive his mother for her part in the operation. Thus, this harrowing time left its mark on Williams work as the obvious autobiographical undertones permeate The Glass Menagerie (1944) and there is much of Rose in the unstable Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire.
In the years following his graduation from Iowa, Williams lived a bohemian life, working menial jobs and wandering from city to city. It is suggested that it was during his time spent in New Orleans Williams discovered his sexual identity and became a practising homosexual. Sexual liberation went hand in hand with confidence in his work.

He continued to work on drama, however, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying playwriting at the New School in New York. He officially changed his name to Tennessee Williams upon the publication of his short story “The Field of Blue Children” in 1939. During the early years of World War II, Williams worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and also prepared material for what would become The Glass Menagerie.

In 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in New York and won the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, catapulting Williams into the upper echelons of American playwrights. A Streetcar Named Desire premiered three years later at the Barrymore Theatre in New York City. The play, set in contemporary times, describes the decline and fall of a fading Southern belle named Blanche DuBois. A Streetcar Named Desire cemented Williams’ reputation, garnering another Drama Critics’ Circle Award and also a Pulitzer Prize. Williams went on to win another Drama Critics’ Circle Award and Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.

Much of the pathos found in Williams’ drama was mined from his own life. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness, and insanity were all part of Williams’ world. His experience as a known homosexual in an era unfriendly to homosexuality also informed his work. Williams’ most memorable characters, many of them female, contain recognizable elements of their author, Edwina, and Rose. His vulgar, irresponsible male characters, such as Stanley Kowalski, were likely modelled on Williams’ own father and other males who tormented Williams during his childhood.

Williams’ early plays also connected with the new American taste for realism that emerged following the Depression and World War II. The characters in A Streetcar Named Desire are trying to rebuild their lives in post-war America: Stanley and Mitch served in the military, while Blanche had affairs with young soldiers based near her home.

Williams set his plays in the South, but the compelling manner in which he rendered his themes made them universal, winning him an international audience and worldwide acclaim. However, most critics agree that the quality of Williams’ work diminished as he grew older. He suffered a long period of depression following the death of his long-time partner, Frank Merlo, in 1963. His popularity during these years also declined due to changed interests in the theatre world. During the radical 1960s and 1970s, nostalgia no longer drew crowds, and Williams’ explorations of sexual mores came across as tired and old-fashioned.

Williams died in 1983 when he choked on a medicine-bottle cap in an alcohol-related incident at the Elysée Hotel in New York City. He was one month short of his seventy-second birthday.