Thomas Lanier Williams was born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi
His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a shoe salesman who spent a great deal of his time away from the family.
Williams had one older sister and one younger brother. They spent much of their childhood in the home of their maternal grandfather who was an Episcopal minister.
Williams studied for several years at the University of Missouri, but withdrew before completing his degree and took a job in St. Louis at the International Shoe Company where his father worked.
Other odd jobs with which he supported himself included waiter, elevator operator, and theater usher.
He eventually returned to school and received a degree from the University of Iowa in 1938. Whether in school or working in the factory, Williams was constantly writing.
In 1939, Williams moved to New Orleans and formally adopted his college nickname "Tennessee" - which was the state of his father's birth. For many years Williams lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. He first moved there in 1939 to write for the WPA
The Prolific Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams drew heavily on his family experiences in his writings.
Rose Williams, who was perhaps the greatest influence on him. She was an elegant, slim beauty who was subject to severe nervous attacks and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Mentally ill and emotionally disturbed, she spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. After various unsuccessful attempts at therapy, her parents eventually allowed a prefrontal lobotomy in an effort to treat her. The operation, performed in 1943, in Washington, D.C. went badly, and Rose remained incapacitated for the rest of her life.
Rose's failed lobotomy was a hard blow to Tennessee, who never forgave his parents for allowing the operation. It may have been one of the factors that drove him to alcoholism. The common "mad heroine" theme that appears in many of his plays may have been influenced by his sister.
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.
His works have been translated into at least twenty-seven languages, and countless productions of his work have been staged around the world.
Tennessee Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo in 1947 while living in New Orleans.
Merlo was a second generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II . Together they vacationed in Italy where the writer drew inspiration from the passion for life he felt there.
In 1948, Williams wrote "The Rose Tattoo" -- a passionate comedy about old love lost, and new love found in the life of a family of Sicilian immigrants.
The story line follows Williams' own life experiences in meeting Merlo. It stands out as the only major play by Williams that has a happy ending.
Merlo was a steadying influence in the chaotic life of the living-legend of theater. He was a confidant and artistic adviser, as well as a devoted partner.
It has been said that people were drawn to Tennessee Williams as a celebrity, but those who maintained lasting friendships with him were drawn by Merlo's charm.
After 14 years as a couple, tragedy struck. Frank Merlo died in 1961 of lung cancer.
Williams went into a deep depression that lasted for ten years, which he later described as his "stoned age."
"When your candle burns low, you've got to believe that the last light shows you something besides the progress of darkness" - Inscription by Tennessee Williams on a photo of Merlo
Tennessee Williams was the victim of a gay-bashing in January 1979 in Key West, being beaten by five teenage boys, but was not seriously injured. The episode was part of a spate of anti-gay violence that had occurred after a local Baptist minister ran an anti-gay newspaper ad. Some of his literary critics spoke ill of the "excesses" present in his work, but these were, for the most part, merely attacks on Williams' sexuality.
The Tortured Soul of Tennessee Williams
Williams struggled with depression through out his life.
At a young age he suffered a nervous break down, and he lived with the constant fear that he would go insane as did his sister Rose.
For periods of his life, Williams battled with addictions to prescription drugs and alcohol.
He was also tortured by the thoughts that he had abandoned Merlo at the time of his declining health.
"Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted
by a truly awful sense of impermanence."-- Tennessee Williams
Most biographers attribute his inner conflicts in part to the social strain placed on Williams as a known homosexual during a hostile period in American history.
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.
However, some (among them is Dakin Williams, his brother) believe he was murdered. Alternately, the police report from his death seems to indicate that drugs were involved, as it states that pills were found under his body.
His Works
Genre critics maintain that Williams writes in the Southern Gothic style.
Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature.
Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot.
Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South.
The Southern Gothic author usually avoids perpetuating antebellum stereotypes like the contented slave, the demure Southern belle, the chivalrous gentleman, or the righteous Christian preacher.
Instead, the writer takes classic Gothic archetypes, such as the damsel in distress or the heroic knight, and portrays them in a more modern and realistic manner —transforming them into, for example, spiteful or reclusive spinster, or a white-suited and fan-brandishing lawyer with ulterior motives.
One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is the grotesque — a stock character who possesses some cringe-inducing qualities typically racial bigotry and egotistical self-righteousness — but enough good traits that the reader finds himself empathizing nevertheless.
While often disturbing, Southern Gothic authors use deeply flawed characters for greater narrative range and more opportunities to highlight unpleasant aspects in Southern culture, without being too literal or appearing to be overly moralizing.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat On a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.
In addition to those two plays, The Glass Menagerie in 1945 and The Night of the Iguana in 1961 received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards.
His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo (dedicated to his partner, Frank Merlo), received the Tony Award for best play.
Random Note: The Simpsons parodied the play with a "musical version" in the episode entitled "A Streetcar Named Marge." The musical presented by the characters in the show humorously misses Williams' point entirely, ending with a song featuring the lyrics "You can always depend on the kindness of strangers."
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TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (a not so brief history)
He was brilliant and prolific, breathing life and passion into such memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in his critically acclaimed A Streetcar Named Desire. And like them, he was troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol and drugs and an openly gay man during intolerant times. He was derided by critics and blacklisted by Roman Catholic Cardinal Spellman, who condemned one of his scripts as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, and offensive to Christian standards of decency.” He was Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest playwrights in American history.
Thomas Lanier Williams III was born March 26, 1911 of English, Welsh and Huguenot descent, in Columbus, Mississippi the second child of Edwina and Cornelius Coffin (C.C.) Williams. His grandfather, Walter Dakin, was the local Episcopal priest, and his maternal grandmother, Rose O. Dakin, was a music teacher. Shortly after his birth, his grandfather Dakin was assigned to a parish in Clarksdale, Mississippi and Williams' early childhood was spent in the parsonage there.
He attended Soldan High School, a setting referred to in his work The Glass Menagerie. Later he studied at University City High School. At age 16, Williams won third prize (five dollars) for an essay published in the magazine Smart Set entitled Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport? A year later, his short story The Vengeance of Nitocris was published in the magazine Weird Tales.
From 1929 to 1931, he attended the University of Missouri, in Columbia, where he enrolled in journalism classes. Williams found his classes boring. He was soon entering his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests, hoping to earn extra income. His first submitted play was Beauty was the Word (1930), followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning (1932). As recognition for Beauty a play about rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a contest.
At Mizzou, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not fit in well with his fraternity brothers. The brothers found him shy and socially backward, a loner who spent most of his time at the typewriter. After he failed military training in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at the International Shoe factory. Although Williams, then 21, hated the monotony of the blue-collar world, the job forced him out of the pretentious gentility of his upbringing, which had tinged him with his mother's snobbery and detachment from reality. His dislike of the nine-to-five work routine drove him to write even more than before, and he gave himself a goal of writing one story a week, working on Saturday and Sunday, into the night. His mother recalled his intensity: "Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house. Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes”.
Overworked, unhappy and lacking any further success with his writing, by his twenty-fourth birthday he had suffered a nervous breakdown and left his job. Memories of this period, and a particular factory co-worker, became part of the character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1936 Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis where he wrote the play Me Vashya (1937). In 1938, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Iowa, where he wrote Spring Storm. He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City. Speaking of his early days as a playwright and referring to an early collaborative play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! produced while he was a part of an amateur summer theater group in Memphis, Tennessee, Williams wrote, "The laughter ... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life. Around 1939, he adopted "Tennessee Williams" as his professional name. Whether it was from, as he once wrote, "a desire to climb the family tree," or that his fraternity brothers nicknamed him for his thick southern drawl, no one seems to know.
In the late 1930s, as the young playwright struggled to have his work accepted, he supported himself with a string of menial jobs (including a notably disastrous stint as caretaker on a chicken ranch outside Los Angeles). In 1939, with the help of his agent, Audrey Wood, he was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition of his play Battle of Angels which was produced in Boston in 1940, but poorly received.
Using the remainder of the Rockefeller funds, Williams moved to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt which was created to put people back to work and helped many artists, musicians and writers survive during the Great Depression. He lived for a time in the French Quarter; first at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré. (The building is now part of The Historic New Orleans Collection).
During the winter of 1944–45, his "memory play" The Glass Menagerie was successfully produced in Chicago garnering good reviews. It moved to New York where it became an instant and enormous hit during its long Broadway run. The play tells the story of a young man, Tom, his disabled sister, Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda, who tries to make a match between Laura and a gentleman caller. Williams' use of his own familial relationships as inspiration for the play is impossible to miss. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams' greatest successes) said of Williams: "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.
The huge success of his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1947 secured his reputation as a great playwright. At the age of 36 widely celebrated and increasingly wealthy, he was still restless and insecure in the grip of fears that he would not be able to duplicate his success. During the late 1940s and 1950s Williams began to travel widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. To stimulate his writing he moved often, to various cities including New York, New Orleans, Key West, Rome, Barcelona, and London. Williams wrote, "Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.
Between 1948 and 1959 seven of his plays were performed on Broadway: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959 he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.
His work reached world-wide audiences in the early 1950s when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into motion pictures. Later plays also adapted for the screen included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana and Summer and Smoke.
In 1980 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter and is today acknowledged as one of the most accomplished playwrights in the history of English speaking theater.
FATHER
Cornelius Williams was a descendant of east Tennessee pioneer stock (hence Williams’ professional name). His father was a hard-drinking traveling shoe salesman who spent most of his time away from home. When Williams was seven years old, his father was promoted to a job at the home office of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis. His mother's continual search for what she considered to be an appropriate address, as well as his father's heavy drinking and loudly violent behavior, caused them to move numerous times around the city. By the mid-1930s his father's increasing alcoholism and abusive temper finally led Edwina to separate from him although they never divorced. A man prone to use his fists, he had part of his ear bitten off in a fight during a poker game. As a small child Williams suffered a bout of diphtheria which nearly ended his life and left him weak and virtually confined to his house during a period of recuperation that lasted a year. At least in part as a result of his illness, he was less robust as a child than his father would have wished. Cornelius later disdained his son’s effeminacy and wanted him to get a real job and give up the folly of being a writer.
MOTHER
His mother, Edwina, was an archetype of the ‘Southern belle’, whose social aspirations tilted toward snobbery and whose behavior could be neurotic and hysterical. His mother was locked in an unhappy marriage and focused her overbearing attention almost entirely on Tom. Many theorize that Williams found inspiration in his dysfunctional family for much of his writing. Williams work is a series of variations on the great emotional cycles of his own tortured life.
SISTER
His family included an older sister Rose and a younger brother, Dakin. Tennesse or ‘Tom’, as he was called in his youth, developed a close bond with his sister, born only sixteen months apart, they were “as inseparable as twins, sometimes referred to as ‘The Couple’. Rose and their black nursemaid, Ozzie, were Williams' only companions as a child. Growing up in a female-dominated environment gave Williams empathy for the woman characters he created as a playwright. Shy, fragile and predisposed to emotional disturbances, eventually to the point of mental illness, Rose inspired a host of characters in his fiction.
Williams' writings include mention of some of the poets and writers he most admired in his early years: Hart Crane, Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, August Strindberg, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Emily Dickinson. In later years the list grew to include William Inge, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway; of the latter, he said "Hemingway’s great quality, aside from his prose style, is this fearless expression of brute nature”.
After the extraordinary successes of the 1940s and 50s the 1960s and 70s brought personal turmoil and theatrical failures. Although he continued to write every day, the quality of his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption as well as often poor choices of collaborators. Consumed by depression over the death of his longtime partner Frank Merlo, and in and out of treatment facilities under the control of his mother and Dakin, Williams spiraled downward. A series of plays from 1967 to 1980 were box office failures, and the relentlessly negative press notices wore down his spirit. His last play A House Not Meant to Stand was produced in Chicago in 1982 and despite largely positive reviews ran for only 40 performances.
Critics and audiences alike may have failed to acknowledge Williams' new style and novel approach to theater he developed during 1960s and refused to accept daring and different work from the playwright. Williams said, “I’ve been working like a son of a bitch since 1969 to make an artistic comeback…there is no release short of death” and “I want to warn you, Elliot, the critics are out to get me. You’ll see how vicious they are. They make comparisons with my earlier work, but I’m writing differently now”. Williams to the end was concerned with "the depths and origin of human feelings and motivations, the difference being that he had gone into a deeper, more obscure realm, which, of course, put the poet in him to the fore, and not the playwright who would bring much concern for audience and critical reaction”. Most likely the truth is that to the end of his life Williams was as vibrant, creative and experimental a writer as ever, yet he succumbed to the slow torture of his critics.
.After some early attempts at heterosexual relationships, by the late 1930s Williams had accepted his homosexuality. In New York he joined a gay social circle which included fellow writer and close friend Donald Windham and his then partner Fred Melton. In the summer of 1940 Williams initiated an affair with Kip Kiernan a young Canadian dancer he met in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Kiernan left him for a woman and marriage he was distraught, and Kiernan's death four years later at 26 delivered another blow.
On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico, Williams met Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales, a hotel clerk of Mexican heritage. Rodriguez was, by all accounts, loving and loyal but also prone to jealous rages and excessive drinking, so the relationship was a tempestuous one. Nevertheless, in February 1946 Rodriguez left New Mexico to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment and they lived and traveled together until late 1947 when Williams ended the affair. Rodriguez and Williams remained friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s.
Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a teenaged Italian boy to whom he provided financial assistance for several years afterward, a situation which planted the seed of Williams' first novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. When he returned to New York that fall, he met and fell in love with Frank Phillip Merlo an occasional actor of Sicilian heritage who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II.
This one enduring romantic relationship of Williams' life lasted 14 years until infidelities and drug abuse on both sides ended it. Merlo, who became Williams' personal secretary, taking on most of the details of their domestic life, provided a period of happiness and stability as well as a balance to the playwright's frequent bouts with depression and the fear that, like his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity. Their years together, in an apartment in Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida, were Williams' happiest and most productive. Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and Williams returned to take care of him until his death on September 21, 1963.
As he had feared, in the years following Merlo's death Williams was plunged into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use resulting in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. He submitted to injections by Dr. Max Jacobson, known popularly as Dr.Feelgood, who used increasing amounts of amphetamines to overcome his depression and combined these with prescriptions for the sedative Seconal to relieve his insomnia. Williams appeared several times in interviews in a nearly incoherent state, and his reputation both as a playwright and as a public personality suffered. He was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.
On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead in his suite at the Elysee Hotel in New York at age 71. The medical examiner's report indicated that he choked to death on the cap from a bottle of eyedrops he frequently used, further indicating that his use of drugs and alcohol may have contributed to his death by suppressing his gag reflex. Prescription drugs, including barbiturates, were found in the room.
Contrary to his expressed wishes but at Dakin Williams' insistence, Tennessee Williams was interred in the Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri. Williams had long told his friends he wanted to be buried at sea at approximately the same place as Hart Crane, a
poet he considered to be one of his most significant influences. Williams left his literary rights to The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee in honor of his grandfather, Walter Dakin, an alumnus of the university. The funds support a creative writing program. When his sister Rose died in 1996 after many years in a mental institution, she bequeathed $7 million from her part of the Williams estate to The University of the South as well.
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