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Born: March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, United States

Died: February 24, 1983, in New York City, New York, United States

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, the first son and second child of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Dakin Williams. His mother, the daughter of a minister, was of genteel upbringing, while his father, a shoe salesman, came from a prestigious Tennessee family which included the state’s first governor and first senator. The family lived for several years in Clarksdale, Mississippi, before moving to St. Louis in 1918. At the age of 16, he encountered his first brush with the publishing world when he won third prize and received $5 for an essay, “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?,” in Smart Set. A year later, he published “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in Weird Tales. In 1929, he entered the University of Missouri. His success there was dubious, and in 1931 he began work for a St. Louis shoe company. It was six years later when his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, was produced in Memphis, in many respects the true beginning of his literary and stage career.

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. After a brief encounter with enrollment at Washington University, St. Louis, he entered the University of Iowa and graduated in 1938. As the second World War loomed over the horizon, Williams found a bit of fame when he won the Group Theater prize of $100 for American Blues and received a $1,000 grant from the Authors’ League of America in 1939. Battle of Angels was produced in Boston a year later. Near the close of the war in 1944, what many consider to be his finest play, The Glass Menagerie, had a very successful run in Chicago and a year later burst its way onto Broadway. 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. Williams, at the age of 34, had etched an indelible mark among the public and among his peers.

Following the critical acclaim over The Glass Menagerie, over the next eight years he found homes for A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real on Broadway. Although his reputation on Broadway continued to zenith, particularly upon receiving his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for Streetcar, Williams reached a larger world-wide public in 1950 when The Glass Menagerie and again in 1951 when A Streetcar Named Desire were made into motion pictures. Williams had now achieved a fame few playwrights of his day could equal.

Over the next thirty years, dividing his time between homes in Key West, New Orleans, and New York, his reputation continued to grow and he saw many more of his works produced on Broadway and made into films, including such works as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he earned a second Pulitzer Prize in 1955), Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana. There is little doubt that as a playwright, fiction writer, poet, and essayist, Williams helped transform the contemporary idea of the Southern literature. However, as a Southerner he not only helped to pave the way for other writers, but also helped the South find a strong voice in those auspices where before it had only been heard as a whisper. Williams died on February 24, 1983, at the Hotel Elys�e in New York City.

Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

A Streetcar Named Desire

The Glass Menagerie

The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams by Matthew Roudane	This is a collection of fourteen original essays from a team of leading scholars. In this wide-ranging volume, contributors cover a sampling of the work of Tennessee Williams, not only the major plays, but also the minor stage works, short stories, and poems. Introduction - MATTHEW C. ROUDANE Early Williams: the making of a playwright - ALLEAN HALE Entering The Glass Menagerie - C. W. E. BIGSBY A streetcar running fifty years - FELICIA HARDISON LONDRE Camino Real: Williams's allegory about the fifties - JAN BALAKIAN Writing in "A place of stone": Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - ALBERT J. DEVLIN Before the Fall - and after: Summer and Smoke and The Night of the Iguana - THOMAS P. ADLER The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth - JOHN M. CLUM Romantic textures in Tennessee Williams's plays and short stories - NANCY M. TISCHLER Creative rewriting: European and American influences on the dramas of Tennessee Williams - GILBERT DEBUSSCHER Seeking direction - BRENDA MURPHY Hollywood in crisis: Tennessee Williams and the evolution of the adult film - R. BARTON PALMER Tennessee Williams: the last two decades - RUBY COHN Words on Williams: a bibliographic essay - JACQUELINE O'CONNOR The Strangest Kind of Romance: Tennessee Williams and his Broadway critics - JACQUELINE O'CONNOR

The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams by Donald Spoto	"It is difficult to imagine a more intimate and understanding biography. It has all the fascination of a well-conducted tour of a very talented man's inferno." -Chicago Sun-Times "Ambitious, brilliant, unsettling - a work of honest reverence." -San Francisco Chronicle "The first complete account of Williams's life - immaculately detailed." -London Times "A persuasive and satisfying portrait, always reliable." -Washington Post "Exhaustively researched, it will stand the test of time as the essential study of Williams for years to come." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Spoto has produced a richly detailed study. His book is a fascinating piece of literacy and theatrical history. To read it is to observe not a simple sequence of events but a constantly overlapping series of gradual emergences." -London Review of Books "Compassionate and comprehensive, written with supple clarity and insight." -Cleveland Plain Dealer This is the first complete, critical biography of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of America's finest playwrights and the author of (among many important works) The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Night of the Iguana. Award-winning biographer Donald Spoto gives us not only a full and accurate account of Williams's life; he also reveals the intimate connections between the playwright's personal dramas and his remarkably autobiographical art. From his birth into a genteel Southern family, through his success, celebrity, and wealth, to his drug addictions, promiscuity, and creative struggles, Tennessee Williams lived a life as gripping as his plays. The Kindness of Strangers, based on Williams's own papers, his mother's diaries, and interviews with scores of friends, lovers, and professional associates, is, in the author's words, a portrait of "a man more disturbing, more dramatic, richer and more wonderful than any character he created." Donald Spoto is the author of fifteen books, among them internationally best-selling biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, and (most recently) Ingrid Bergman.

Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams by David Savran	"Historical sociology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and rhetorical analysis are just a few of the techniques used with great subtlety and sophistication in this study of gender in the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. David Savran gives us a sobering portrait of the patriarchal postwar epoch in the United States." Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty "David Savran's Communists, Cowboys, and Queers is a passionately conceived and beautifully articulated work that not only throws new light on American dramatic literature but illuminates in a new way an entire cultural epoch." Martin Duberman, author of Cures. Distinguished Professor of History Graduate Center, CUNY During the late 1940s and 1950s, argues David Savran, the baiting and brutalization of "communists and queers" were high on the national agenda. Within this historical context, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers offers a bold and radical reassessment of the works of theater's most prominent and respected figures - Arthur Miller, the alleged communist, and Tennessee Williams, the self-acknowledged "queer." Savran analyzes the radically different configurations of gender and sexuality in Miller's and Williams's writings and studies the ways in which each confronted and negotiated the postwar homophobic and anticommunism crusades. Through a detailed reexamination of their plays, films, and short stories, Savran argues against the popular images of both playwrights and the findings of most academic critics. Ultimately, his provocative exploration of the constitution of the Old Left, the demographic changes following World War II, the gay rights movement, the New Left, and the counterculture distinguishes Communists, Cowboys, and Queers as the first book rigorously to historicize the achievements of Miller and Williams. DAVID SAVRAN is associate professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group and In Their Words: Contemporary American Playwrights.

Broadway Theatre Archive Tennessee Williams Collection (Eccentricities of a Nightingale/Ten Blocks on the Camino Real/Dragon Country)	*Eccentricities of a Nightingale* Tony Award-winning actress, Blythe Danner, portrays the sensitive spinster Alma Winemiller in Tennessee Williams' 1948 drama. Frustrated with longing for the socially prominent young doctor next door, the eccentric, highly emotional minister's daughter decides to settle for one night with him in a rented hotel room. The Washington Post wrote: "Blythe Danner's Alma is as much of a television event as Katharine Hepburn's Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Frank Langella is such a warm, dreamy-eyed Dr. Buchanan that the role is reimbursed for the loss of its cynical edge with a smooth romanticism that complements Danner's determined honesty splendidly." "How many different emotions do you expect in two hours?" --The New York Daily News. With Tim O'Connor, Louise Latham, and Neva Patterson. *Ten Blocks on the Camino Real* Martin Sheen stars as the eternal American G.I. Kilroy, a poetic soul condemned to spiritual death, in Tennessee Williams's allegorical one-act play. In a dreamlike fictitious Latin American country, a worn-out Casanova, a Camille living on memories, a Byron pitiful in his disillusioned pride, and others less famous live out a hopeless existence. Into this world comes Kilroy, an ex-boxer and perpetual fall guy, who asks so little and always gets short-changed, but never gives up hope. He is finally conned, or almost, into despairing subjection like the rest. "An allegory about people removed from time and geography..." --The New York Times. With Lotte Lenya, Tom Aldredge, Michael Baseleon, and Albert Dekker. *Dragon Country* This production pairs together two Tennessee Williams plays, written twenty years apart, each examining the theme of isolation with searing clarity. The joint presentation features the world premiere of "I Can't Imagine Tomorrow," starring two-time Oscar nominee Kim Stanley (The Right Stuff) and William Redfield (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), and a much earlier work, "Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen," starring Lois Smith (Five Easy Pieces)and Alan Mixon. Together, the dramas delve into "A land of endured but unendurable pain," said Williams, "where each one is so absorbed, deafened, blinded by his own journey across it, he sees, he looks for, no one else crawling across it with him."

A Streetcar Named Desire	Looking for a benchmark in movie acting? Breakthrough performances don't come much more electrifying than Marlon Brando's animalistic turn as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Sweaty, brutish, mumbling, yet with the balanced grace of a prizefighter, Brando storms through the role--a role he had originated in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's celebrated play. Stanley and his wife, Stella (as in Brando's oft-mimicked line, "Hey, Stellaaaaaa!"), are the earthy couple in New Orleans's French Quarter whose lives are upended by the arrival of Stella's sister, Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh). Blanche, a disturbed, lyrical, faded Southern belle, is immediately drawn into a battle of wills with Stanley, beautifully captured in the differing styles of the two actors. This extraordinarily fine adaptation won acting Oscars for Leigh, Kim Hunter (as Stella), and Karl Malden (as Blanche's clueless suitor), but not for Brando. Although it had already been considerably cleaned up from the daringly adult stage play, director Elia Kazan was forced to trim a few of the franker scenes he had shot. In 1993, Streetcar was rereleased in a "director's cut" that restored these moments, deepening a film that had already secured its place as an essential American work.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	Maggie is the feline in question, as portrayed by a smoldering, angry Elizabeth Taylor. Paul Newman is her ex-athlete husband, Brick Pollitt, an alcoholic who frustrates and disappoints his wife and his overbearing father. Burl Ives is Big Daddy, the vulgar patriarch of this positively gothic Southern family whose children return to the nest like vultures when they learn he is dying of cancer. Infidelities, addictions, latent homosexuality, depression, unrequited love, and mendacity are woven into this still-powerful adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Though it was somewhat whitewashed by Hollywood, the sentiment remains powerful because of the provocative performances. It was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Actor and Actress for Newman and Taylor.