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Born, Thomas Lanier
Williams, in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911,
Tennessee Williams was the first of two children
born into a prestigious Tennessee family. The
family lived for seven years in Clarksdale, Mississippi, before moving to
St. Louis in 1918. He went to college at the
University of Missouri, but he did not stay long. He returned to St. Louis and worked
for a shoe company, and struggled to find a way to
make a living writing. His literary career did not
show promise until six years later when he produced
his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, in
Memphis.
Building upon the
experience he gained with his first production,
Williams had two of his plays, Candles to the Sun
and The Fugitive Kind, produced by Mummers of
St. Louis in 1937. He briefly attended Washington
University before transferring to the
University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938.
In 1939, just one
year after graduating, he produced Battle of
Angels in
Boston. In 1945,
The Glass Menagerie
found
its way onto Broadway with both commercial and
critical appeal. Containing autobiographical
elements from both his days in St. Louis as well as
from his family’s past in Mississippi, the play won
the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award as the best
play of the season.
The next eight years produced Street Car Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose Tatoo, and
Camino Real on Broadway. He received his first
Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for
Streetcar. In 1950, his
work reached an international audience when
Streetcar Named Desire was made into a movie. The
following year,
The Glass Menagerie
found a
home on the silver screen. Williams had now
achieved a fame few playwrights of his day could
equal.
His
financial success allowed him to divide his time
between a home in New York, New Orleans, and Key
West. And for the next thirty years, from the early
fifties to the early eighties, his reputation grew
and more of his works were produced on Broadway and
made into films. His play,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
was a tremendous success and earned him his
second Pulitzer Prize in 1955,
Orpheus
Descending,
and
Night of the Iguana.
There is little doubt that as a playwright, fiction
writer, and poet, Williams helped change the
contemporary idea of the Southern literature. He
helped the South find a fresh, strong voice by which
to convey their experiences. As a Southerner he
not only led the way for other southern writers, but
also helped the South discover the strong, true
voice buried beneath its history and hushed culture.
Tennessee
Williams died on February 24, 1983, at the Hotel
Elysée in New York City.
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