Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was a liberal American playwright whose works are often taught in high school. He is perhaps best known for two works: The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, both of which drew from his life experiences for inspiration.

Life

Tennessee (born Thomas Lanier) Williams was born and raised in Columbus, Mississippi. He was admitted to the University of Missouri in 1929. It was there that he saw a performance of Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen and subsequently decided he wanted to become a playwright. He was able to have two of his early plays produced in 1937, and the following year, he moved to New Orleans and changed his name to Tennessee. In 1944, he debuted The Glass Menagerie in Chicago, which, after a successful run, made its way to Broadway. The play helped to establish him as an important American voice in theater. The year 1947 saw him debut perhaps his most famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire, which would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize, the first of two he would win in his career (the other one being for his 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Williams would go on to write regularly until his death in 1983.

Legacy

Tennessee Williams is generally recognized as one of the greatest American playwrights, of his or any other time. His plays are performed regularly in theaters across North America to this day.

Works

Williams was very prolific and left behind a significant body of work, including:

Plays

• 27 Wagons Full of Cotton
• Camino Real
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Clothes for a Summer Hotel
• The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
• The Fugitive Kind
• The Glass Menagerie
• A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
• The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
• The Night of the Iguana
• Orpheus Descending
• Period of Adjustment
• The Red Devil Battery Sign
• The Rose Tattoo
• Small Craft Warnings
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Suddenly Last Summer
• Summer and Smoke
• Sweet Bird of Youth
• Vieux Carre

Fiction

• Hard Candy
• One Arm, and Other Stories
• The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

Poetry

• In the Winter of Cities
• Androgyne, Mon Amour

Other

• Baby Doll (screenplay)
• Memoirs

External links

• Tennessee Williams at The Mississippi Writers Page
• The Tennessee Williams Annual Review
• Tennessee Williams at Internet Broadway Database