Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams biography

Tennessee Williams is widely considered one of the greatest American playwrights of all time. His best-known works include The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. His older sister Rose struggled with mental illness and was given a lobotomy in 1943, and many characters in his plays, most famously Laura in The Glass Menagerie, are drawn from her.

Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, to Edwina Dakin and Cornelius Coffin Williams. He spent his early childhood in Mississippi before the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, when his father took a job with a shoe company. He had an older sister, Rose Isabel Williams (1909–1996), and a younger brother, Walter Dakin Williams (1919–2008).

He studied at the University of Missouri and Washington University in St. Louis before finishing his degree at the University of Iowa in 1938. Soon after, he began using the name Tennessee.

A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner

Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. The Glass Menagerie, his first major success, opened on Broadway in 1945 and made his name.

His most famous plays

His most famous plays include The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana.

In his plays, he explores the dark side of human nature. These are stories filled with characters who struggle with loneliness and loss, as well as their desires to be loved or accepted by others. Roles like Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Amanda Wingfield and Maggie the Cat are some of the most sought-after in American theater.

Tennessee Williams death

Tennessee Williams died on February 25, 1983, at the age of 71, in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York City. The medical examiner ruled that he had choked on the cap of a medicine bottle.

Although he had asked to be buried at sea, he was buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

A prolific playwright

Williams was a prolific writer, producing dozens of full-length and one-act plays as well as short stories, poems and memoirs. He was nominated for Academy Awards for the screenplays of A Streetcar Named Desire and Baby Doll.

The mid-20th century was a golden age for American theater, and Tennessee Williams wrote some of the most important works that helped define this era. His legacy lives on through the plays he wrote, which are still performed all over the world.

See where Williams sits among the 50 famous playwrights every actor should know, and the plays that made the list of the greatest plays of all time.

Further reading: The New Yorker on Tennessee Williams.