Tennessee Williams

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The Author: Tennessee Williams

You should not spend too long talking about the life of the author as you will not gain many marks for doing this. But it is still important to note a few things about the author for context.

Hometown

Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi.
Mississippi is a state in the south of the United State of America.
Some scholars have observed that he shares his southern roots with many of the characters in the play.

Williams' family

Williams had English, Welsh, and Huguenot ancestry.
His father was a travelling shoe salesman who became an alcoholic and was frequently away from home.
His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of a music teacher and the Reverend Walter Dakin, an Episcopal priest from Illinois who was assigned to a parish in Mississippi shortly after Williams’ birth.
Williams lived in his parsonage with his family for much of his early childhood and was close to his grandparents.

University life

Williams went to the University of Missouri, in Columbia, where he enrolled in journalism classes.
He was bored by his classes and was distracted by unrequited love for a girl.
He soon began entering his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests, hoping to earn both extra income and success.

Early career

After university, Williams had a set of menial jobs.
In 1939, he moved to New Orleans in Louisiana for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This brought him to the attention of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio. He worked for them for a while as a writer.

Sex life

Williams had several relationships with women, but during the 1930s he realised that he was homosexual.

We need to be careful about fully connecting the author’s life to the text of a play because this can be dangerous. What the author has written may be an ‘imagined construction’ only and have little to do with the author’s life.

The Glass Menagerie

During the winter of 1944–45, Williams' so-called “memory play” The Glass Menagerie, developed from his 1943 short story Portrait of a Girl in Glass, was produced in Chicago and gained good reviews.
It then moved to New York and was very successful.

A Streetcar Named Desire

His next play, A Streetcar Named Desire opened in New York in 1947. The play was an instant success.
It was directed by Elia Kazan – a director who worked closely with Williams.

Other plays

Several other successful plays followed including Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

Blanche

Some critics have argued that the character of Blanche is based on Williams’ sister, Rose Williams, who struggled with mental health issues and became incapacitated after a lobotomy.

Films

During the early 1950s, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were adapted as major motion pictures and this brought Williams international acclaim.

Later life

After this early success, however, Williams' work declined following poor decisions.
He became an alcoholic. In 1963, his partner Frank Merlo died.
Williams wrote several later plays but few of these were appreciated by critics or audiences.
On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead at the age of 71 in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York.