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Tennessee Williams

 
Who2 Profiles:

Tennessee Williams, Playwright

  • Born: 26 March 1911
  • Birthplace: Columbus, Mississippi
  • Died: 25 February 1983 (choking)
  • Best Known As: Pulitzer-winning author of A Streetcar Named Desire

Name at birth: Thomas Lanier Williams

Tennessee Williams wrote smoldering, passionate, conflicted dramas that attracted top actors and gave 20th-century American theater and film some of its most complex and enduring material. Reared in Mississippi and Missouri, Williams experienced the beauty of the South and the warmth of family as well as turmoil--including his father's emotional volatility and his own and his sister's depression--that later showed up in his plays. His greatest hit, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), featured Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski bellowing for his wife, "Stellaaaaah," and Jessica Tandy's Blanche DuBois declaring, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Original productions and revivals of Williams' work on stage, screen and TV drew the likes of Karl Malden and Anthony Quinn (Streetcar), Christopher Walken (Sweet Bird of Youth), Katharine Hepburn (The Glass Menagerie), Burl Ives and Ben Gazzara (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and Bette Davis (Night of the Iguana). Troubled by anxiety, alcohol and drugs throughout his adult life, Williams choked to death in his New York City apartment when the cap of a medicine bottle, which he apparently used as a spoon for pills, got caught in his throat.

Among Williams' numerous honors were another Pulitzer (Cat, 1955) and a Tony Award for best play (The Rose Tattoo, 1950)... He first used the pen name "Tennessee" in 1939. According to his Memoirs (Doubleday, 1972), he chose it because his ancestors had lived there. Reportedly, he also sometimes claimed to have gotten it from college classmates who couldn't remember which Southern state he was from... He began writing poems, stories and plays as a student at the University of Missouri, Washington University in St. Louis, and the State University of Iowa, where he finally graduated in 1938 at age 27... Never married, he had long-term companionships with two men: Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez and Frank Merlo.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Tennessee Williams

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(born March 26, 1911, Columbus, Miss., U.S. — died Feb. 25, 1983, New York, N.Y.) U.S. playwright. The son of a traveling salesman and a clergyman's daughter, he lived in St. Louis from age 12. After attending several colleges he graduated from the University of Iowa (1938). He first won recognition for his group of one-act plays American Blues (1939). Wider success came with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and mounted with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, Pulitzer Prize; film, 1951), Camino Real (1953), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer Prize; film, 1958). His plays, which also include Suddenly Last Summer (1958; film, 1959) and The Night of the Iguana (1961; film, 1964), describe a world of repressed sexuality and violence thinly veiled by gentility. He also wrote the novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950; film, 1961) and the screenplays for The Rose Tattoo (1955, adapted from his 1951 play) and Baby Doll (1956). A clear-sighted chronicler of fragile illusions, he is regarded as one of the greatest American playwrights.

For more information on Tennessee Williams, visit Britannica.com.

Oxford Companion to American Theatre:

Tennessee Williams

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Williams, Tennessee [né Thomas Lanier Williams] (1911–83), playwright. Considered by many to be the leading dramatist of his age, he was born in Columbus, Mississippi. His father was a violent, aggressive traveling salesman; his mother, the high‐minded, puritanical daughter of a clergyman; his elder sister, a young woman beset by mental problems that eventually led to her being institutionalized. His family thus provided him with the seeds for characters who would people so many of his plays. He attended several universities before graduating from the State University of Iowa. During this time some of his early works were produced at regional and collegiate playhouses while he held numerous odd jobs. Williams's first play to receive a major production was Battle of Angels (1940), which folded on the road. Success came with his The Glass Menagerie (1945), followed by such popular dramas as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). During these years he had a number of failures, including You Touched Me! (1945), Camino Real (1953), and Orpheus Descending (1957), but in later years they would be re‐examined, and some would find favor. Although he continued to write and be produced, the plays that followed The Night of the Iguana were neither critical nor commercial successes. His preoccupation with social degeneracy and homosexuality, which had heretofore been contained by his sense of theatre and poetic dialogue, overcame these saving restraints and lost him a public for the newer works. Among these later works were In the Bar in a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1972), Outcry (1973), Vieux Carré (1978), and Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). Fifteen years after his death, an early work titled Not about Nightingales was uncovered and, when it was produced on Broadway in 1999, proved to be a critical success. Williams's strengths in playwriting were in his vivid characterizations and glistening dialogue. His subject matter was sometimes crude or brutal, but his writing remained elegant and poetic. Biography: The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams, Donald Spoto, 1985.

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Tennessee Williams

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Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), dramatist and fiction writer, was one of America's major mid-20th-century playwrights.

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1914. His father was a traveling salesman, and for many years the family lived with his mother's parents. When Williams was about 13, they moved to a crowded tenement in St. Louis, Missouri. At the age of 16 he published his first story. The next year he entered the University of Missouri but left before taking a degree. He worked for two years for a shoe company, spent a year at Washington University (where he had his first plays produced), and earned a bachelor of arts degree from the State University of Iowa in 1938, the year he published his first short story under his literary name.

In 1940 the Theatre Guild produced Williams' Battle of Angels in Boston. The play was a total failure and was withdrawn after Boston's Watch and Ward Society banned it. Between 1940 and 1945 he lived on grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, on income derived from an attempt to write film scripts in Hollywood, and on wages as a waiter-entertainer in Greenwich Village.

With the production of The Glass Menagerie Williams' fortunes changed. The play opened in Chicago in December 1944 and in New York in March; it received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Sidney Howard Memorial Award. You Touched Me!, written in collaboration with Donald Windham, opened on Broadway in 1945. It was followed by publication of 11 one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946), and two California productions. When A Streetcar Named Desire opened in 1947, New York audiences knew a major playwright had arrived. It won a Pulitzer Prize. The play combines sensuality, melodrama, and lyrical symbolism. A film version was directed by Elia Kazan; their partnership lasted for more than a decade.

Although the plays that followed Streetcar never repeated its phenomenal success, they kept Williams's name on theater marquees and films. His novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and three volumes of short stories brought him an even wider audience. Some writers consider Summer and Smoke (1948) Williams's most sensitive play. The Rose Tattoo (1951) played to appreciative audiences, Camino Real (1953) to confused ones. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Baby Doll (an original Williams-Kazan film script, 1956) was followed by the dramas Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958; two one-act plays, Something Unspoken and Suddenly Last Summer), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With these plays, critics charged Williams with public exorcism of private neuroses, confused symbolism, sexual obsessions, thin characterizations, and violence and corruption for their own sake. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1963; also called Kingdom of Earth), and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) neither exonerated him of these charges nor proved that Williams's remarkable talent had vanished.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Williams continued to write for the theater, though he was unable to repeat the success of most of his early years. One of his last plays was Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), based on the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda.

Two collections of Williams's many one-act plays were published: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946) and American Blues (1948). Williams also wrote fiction, including two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975). Four volumes of short stories were also published. One Arm and Other Stories (1948), Hard Candy (1954), The Knightly Quest (1969), and Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974). Nine of his plays were made into films, and he wrote one original screenplay, Baby Doll (1956). In his 1975 tell-all novel, Memoirs, Williams described his own problems with alcohol and drugs and his homosexuality.

Williams died in New York City, February 25, 1983. In 1995, the United States Post Office commemorated Williams by issuing a special edition stamp in his name as part of their Literary Arts Series.

For several years, literary aficionados have gathered to celebrate the man and his work at The Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. The annual event, held in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, features educational, theatrical and literary programs.

Further Reading

There is no uniform edition or omnibus collection of Williams's plays. His mother's reminiscences, Edwina Dakin Williams, Remember Me to Tom (1963), and the account of a friend, Gilbert Maxwell, Tennessee Williams and Friends (1965), provide biographical data. Taped interviews with various artists who worked with Williams give a multifaceted view in Mike Steen, A Look at Tennessee Williams (1969). Accounts of Williams' words were gathered to put together Memoirs (1975); Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham 1940-65 (1977); Albert J. Devlin, Conversations with Tennessee Williams (1986); and Five O'Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maris St. Just 1948-1982 (1990).

The best critical studies are Signi Lenea Falk, Tennessee Williams (1961); Benjamin Nelson, Tennessee Williams: The Man and His Work (1961); Louis Broussard, American Drama: Contemporary Allegory from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams (1962); Francis Donahue, The Dramatic World of Tennessee Williams (1964); Gerald Weales, Tennessee Williams (1965); and Louis Broussard, American Drama: Contemporary Allegory from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams.

(1911-1983), playwright. Considered by some to be America's premier dramatist, Williams achieved popular and critical success with plays about fragile individuals trapped in desperate circumstances. His best-known works--among them The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)--are characterized by decadent southern settings, beautifully cadenced dialogue, expressive stage pictures, bizarre humor, and an aura of sexuality. His greatest legacy is a set of legendary characters, including Blanche DuBois and Big Daddy. Their eccentric personalities and larger-than-life dimensions have appealed to star performers--Laurette Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, and Vivien Leigh, to name a few--who have found them ideal acting vehicles.

Williams was himself a colorful and complex figure. Like his characters, he was restless and driven by contradictory impulses: he was both gentle and fiery, lonely and gregarious, optimistic and fatalistic. His homosexuality, detailed in Memoirs (1975), contributed certain values and sympathies to his plays. But of more significance was the influence of his sister Rose. His devoted companion during their childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, she later became mentally unstable and withdrew from the world. Williams believed her condition was not helped by their parents' unhappy marriage and his own insensitivity to her. In 1937, Rose underwent a prefrontal lobotomy, then considered therapeutic, which necessitated lifelong care in an institution. So deeply did Williams empathize with her trauma that it shaped his master theme--the confining nature of human existence.

A prolific author, Williams wrote more than seventy plays, but his reputation rests largely on his first two Broadway hits. The Glass Menagerie, set in a cramped apartment, focuses poignantly on the escapist dreams of a destitute family. It features the unforgettable Amanda Wingfield, who avoids the hopeless present by living in her southern-belle past, when she was courted by "gentleman callers." Amanda's daughter seems modeled on Rose Williams: the fragile Laura who retreats from reality to play with glass figurines. In his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams created two now-famous characters, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. The playwright's beloved French Quarter in New Orleans provides the setting for a tenacious struggle between high-strung, guilt-ridden Blanche and brutal Stanley. He crushes her spirit, and as Blanche leaves for a mental institution, she speaks movingly of her dependence on "the kindness of strangers." Streetcar earned Williams the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes.

After The Night of the Iguana (1961), Williams suffered a creative crisis and abandoned many of his techniques. Critics disliked the change. Although his later plays lack the memorable characters and rich, suggestive atmospheres of his earlier ones, several are noteworthy. Out Cry (1971), also called The Two-Character Play, is a nonrealistic drama about a brother and sister locked in a theater. The autobiographical Vieux Carré (1978) presents his initial stay in New Orleans during the 1930s from the perspective of his older self, who laments the waning of his imaginative powers.

An artist of international renown, Williams deserves to be ranked with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller among American playwrights. At his best, he outshines both. His lyrical plays have also made a lasting impact on the work of a generation of younger dramatists, including Lanford Wilson and Beth Henley.

Bibliography:

Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (1985); Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (1975).

Author:

Bruce J. Mann

See also Theater.


Columbia Encyclopedia:

Tennessee Williams

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Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams), 1911-83, American dramatist, b. Columbus, Miss., grad. State Univ. of Iowa, 1938. One of America's foremost 20th-century playwrights and the author of more than 70 plays, he achieved his first successes with the productions of The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947; Pulitzer Prize). In these plays, as in many of his later works, Williams explores the intense passions and frustrations of a disturbed and frequently brutal society. Unable to write openly about his homosexuality in the 1950s and 60s, he displaced the imagined and experienced pleasures and pains of sexual relations from the autobiographical into nominally heterosexual dramas.

An eloquently symbolic poet of the theater, Williams is noted for his scenes of high dramatic tension and for his brilliant, often lyrical dialogue. Williams is perhaps most successful in his portraits of the hypersensitive and lonely Southern woman, such as Blanche in Streetcar, clutching at life, particularly at her memories of a grand past that no longer exists. His later plays, which never quite achieve the poignant immediacy of his first two successes, include Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1950), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955; Pulitzer Prize), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1959), Night of the Iguana (1961), The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More (1963), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968), In the Bar of the Tokyo Hotel (1969), and Small Craft Warnings (1972).

A number of Williams's one-act plays were collected in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946) and The American Blues (1948). He also wrote four collections of short fiction: One Arm and Other Stories (1948), Hard Candy (1954), The Knightly Quest (1969), and Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974); a novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950); two volumes of verse, In the Winter of Cities (1956) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977); and a number of film scripts, including one, Baby Doll (1956), based on two of his short plays.

Bibliography

See his Memoirs (1974, repr. 2006) and Notebooks (2007), ed. by M. B. Thornton; D. Windham, ed., Tennessee Williams's Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965 (1976) and A. J. Devlin and N. M. Tischler, ed., The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (2 vol., 2000-2004); A. J. Devlin, ed., Conversations with Tennessee Williams (1986); D. Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (1985, repr. 1997), D. Windham, As If: A Personal View of Tennessee Williams (1985), R. Boxill, Tennessee Williams (1987), R. Hayman, Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience (1993), and L. Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995); critical studies by S. L. Falk (1962), F. Donahue (1964), E. M. Jackson (1965), I. Rogers (1976), J. Tharpe, ed. (1977), H. Rasky (1986), G. W. Crandell, ed. (1996), R. A. Martin, ed. (1997), O, C. Kolin, ed. (2002), R. F. Voss, ed. (2002), M. Paller (2005), and H. Bloom, ed. (rev. ed. 2007).

Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:

Works by Tennessee Williams

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(Thomas Lanier Williams III, 1911-1983)

1939American Blues. This group of related one-act plays wins a Group Theatre contest and brings the playwright his first national recognition. The plays would be published in 1948. Born in Mississippi, Williams attended the University of Missouri and Washington University before winning a Theatre Guild contest and enrolling in the playwriting program at the University of Iowa.
1940Battle of Angels. Williams's first commercial production fails in Boston. The playwright would later revise the play as Orpheus Descending (1945).
1944The Glass Menagerie. Williams's first Broadway success, based on the author's short story "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," dramatizes the enclosed world of the Wingfields: mother Amanda who dreams of success for her son, Tom, and a suitor for the crippled and withdrawn Laura, who retreats to a private fantasy world populated by her collection of glass animals. Their circumstances, relationships, and natures are clarified with the arrival of a purported "gentleman caller" for Laura. The play establishes Williams as one of the founders of the "New Drama," marked by poetic intensity and technical innovation.
1945You Touched Me! Written with Williams's lover, Donald Windham (b. 1920), the play is based on D. H. Lawrence's short story of the same name, about a retired sea captain and his sadistic sister.
194627 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One-Act Plays. Williams's collection of eleven one-act plays displays the full range of his Southern gothic themes, including incest, murder, adultery, and nymphomania. One reviewer observes that the playwright seems to be "a sad young man, at times, wandering amid life in ruins to discover his wistful poetry."
1947A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams's New Orleans masterpiece dramatizes the explosive confrontation between ethereal and delusional Blanche DuBois and the earthy Stanley Kowalski. It wins the playwright the first of his two Pulitzers and is universally regarded as a landmark of modern American theater. Marlon Brando plays Kowalski on the stage and in the 1951 film.
1948One Arm, and Other Stories. Williams's first collection of short stories includes the controversial "Desire and the Black Masseur," dealing with homosexuality and sadomasochism, and "The Night of the Iguana," which Williams would adapt into a play in 1962.
1948Summer and Smoke. Alma Winemiller, a prim minister's daughter, is awakened to her sexuality in this drama of sexual repression set in a small Southern town. Williams would revise the play in 1964 under a new title: The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
1950The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. The first and generally recognized as the better of Williams's two novels (the other is Moise and the World of Reason, 1975) concerns an aging actress's tawdry affair with an Italian gigolo in postwar Rome. Carson McCullers praises the novel as standing "as a work of art with Daisy Miller and Death in Venice. There is in the book the hallmark of the masterpiece."
1951The Rose Tattoo. Williams's play, set in a Sicilian Gulf Coast community, concerns a widow's illusions about her husband and her restoration to the passions of life by another man.
1953Camino Real. Williams's surrealistic fantasy is an expansion of his one-act play Ten Blocks on the Camino Real. Mixing invented lowlife and historical figures, including Byron and Casanova, the play celebrates romantic idealism, baffles critics, and fails with audiences, closing after only thirty performances. Williams would later declare it to be his favorite play, but most critics have judged it one of his weakest.
1954Hard Candy. The second volume of Williams's underappreciated short stories would be followed by several additional collections: Three Players of a Summer Game (1960), The Knightly Quest (1966), Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974), It Happened the Day the Sun Rose (1982), and Collected Stories (1985).
1955Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Williams's treatment of mendacity in a rich Mississippi planter's family wins both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play. The relationship between the ex-football player Brick and his wife, Maggie, turns on Brick's facing his homosexual attraction to his closest friend. The family's patriarch, Big Daddy, also must confront his disappointments and mortality.
1957Orpheus Descending. Williams reworks and retitles his earlier play, Battle of Angels (1940), about lust and hatred in a small Southern town.
1958Suddenly Last Summer. One of Williams's most gothic explorations of the nature of evil concerns a homosexual's sacrificial slaying and cannibalistic consumption. It is produced, together with Something Unspoken (1958), as Garden District and would be adapted for the screen the following year in a film starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift.
1959Sweet Bird of Youth. Williams expands his 1956 one-act play into a drama about an aging Hollywood actress and a young gigolo in a small Gulf Coast town, where the local political boss seeks vengeance for the gigolo's treatment of his daughter. Reviewer Walter Kerr observes that the play is "a succession of fuses, deliberately--and for the most part magnificently--lighted."
1960Period of Adjustment. Williams's attempt at domestic comedy looks at married life among distraught honeymooners and an estranged married couple. Subtitled "A Serious Comedy," the play is full of psychologizing and portentous declamations. It closes after only 132 performances.
1962The Night of the Iguana. Concerning a defrocked priest-turned-Mexican tour director who is drawn to two women representing spiritual and sensual opposites, Williams's drama wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It is his final commercial and critical success.
1963The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. The terminally ill, drug-addicted, many-times-widowed Flora Goforth dictates her memoirs and is visited by a young poet known as the Angel of Death. Williams's heavily freighted symbolic drama is unenthusiastically received and manages a run of only sixty-nine performances.
1966Slapstick Tragedy. Williams's double bill of one-act plays consists of The Gnadiges Fraulein, a parable of the artist's struggle that is set in a seedy Key West boardinghouse, and The Mutilated, about the rivalry between two New Orleans prostitutes. It is, in the words of the playwright, "vaudeville, burlesque, and slapstick, with a dash of pop art." Critics and audiences are unenthusiastic, and the production lasts for only seven performances.
1968The Seven Descents of Myrtle. Adapted from his short story "Kingdom of Earth," Williams's play about a white Mississippi farmer, his new wife, and his half-black half-brother manages only a brief New York run.
1969In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. One of Williams's most intensely personal plays concerns an artist facing the disintegration of his talent. The play manages only a short off-Broadway run, with critics viewing the play as evidence of the playwright's own collapse.
1970Small Craft Warnings. In this drama about a group of outcasts in a California oceanside bar, Williams writes candidly for the first time about his own homosexuality, creating a self-hating gay artist who expresses disdain for the "deadening coarseness" of the lives of most homosexuals.
1975Memoirs. The writer reflects on the influences that shaped his career. Equally confessional and autobiographical is Moise and the World of Reason, a novel about a disappointed, failed homosexual writer.
1977Vieux Carré. In a drama that recalls The Glass Menagerie, Williams's play, set in a boardinghouse in the French Quarter of New Orleans, considers various forms of dying. It manages only five performances on Broadway, dismissed by critic Clive Barnes as "the murmurings of genius, not a major statement."
1979A Lovely Sunday for Crève Coeur. Williams's drama is set in St. Louis during the Depression and concerns a spinster teacher's reaction to the engagement of the man with whom she has been conducting a flirtation. Combining slapstick comedy and pathos, as well as recycling old themes, the play lasts less than a month in its New York run.

Quotes By:

Tennessee Williams

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Quotes:

"A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."

"All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness."

"All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent."

"We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress."

"The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!"

"We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!"

See more famous quotes by Tennessee Williams

AMG AllMovie Guide:

Tennessee Williams

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Biography

Pulitzer-prize winning American playwright Tennessee Williams penned some of the century's best-loved plays, many of which, notably A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Glass Menagerie, have been turned into highly regarded films, some of which he helped adapt to the screen. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Tennessee Williams

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Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams (age 54) photographed by Orland Fernandez in 1965 for the twentieth anniversary of The Glass Menagerie.
Born Thomas Lanier Williams
March 26, 1911(1911-03-26)
Columbus, Mississippi, United States
Died February 25, 1983(1983-02-25) (aged 71)
New York City, New York, United States
Language English
Nationality American
Period 1930–1983

Signature

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs. His professional career lasted from the mid 1930s until his death in 1983, and saw the creation of many plays that are regarded as classics of the American stage. Williams adapted much of his best known work for the cinema.

Williams received virtually all of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama, including several New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award for best play for The Rose Tattoo (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). 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.

Theater scholar Charlotte Canning, of the University of Texas at Austin where Williams' archives are located, has said, "There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams... He inspired future generations of writers as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."[1]

Contents

Biography

Early years

Childhood

Thomas Lanier Williams III was born of Welsh and Huguenot descent, in Columbus, Mississippi, the second child of Edwina and Cornelius Coffin (C.C.) Williams.[2]:11 His grandfather, Walter Dakin, was the local Episcopal priest, and his maternal grandmother, Rose O. Dakin, was a music teacher. His father was a hard-drinking traveling shoe salesman who spent most of his time away from home. His mother, Edwina, was an archetype of the ‘Southern belle’, whose social aspirations tilted toward snobbery and whose behavior could be neurotic and hysterical. 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.

His family included an older sister Rose (1909–1996), and a younger brother, Dakin (1919–2008). ‘Tom’, as he was called in his youth, developed a close bond with his sister. Theater scholar Allean Hale notes that, born only sixteen months apart, they were “as inseparable as twins, sometimes referred to as ‘The Couple’.”[2]:11 Rose and their black nursemaid, Ozzie, were Williams' only companions as a child. Hale speculates that 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.[3]:x

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 Williams was a descendant of east Tennessee pioneer stock (hence Williams’ professional name) and a man prone to use his fists. He disdained his son’s effeminacy and his mother Edwina, locked in an unhappy marriage, focused her overbearing attention almost entirely on Tom. Williams would find inspiration in his dysfunctional family for much of his writing.[citation needed] The biographer Donald Spoto adds “[Williams] work is a series of variations on the great emotional cycles of his own tortured life” (xviii).

Education

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. He attended Soldan High School, a setting referred to in his work The Glass Menagerie. Later he studied at University City High School.[4][5] At age 16, Williams won third prize (five dollars) for an essay published in 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,[6] where he enrolled in journalism classes. While the university's School of Journalism was regarded one of the world's best[by whom?], 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 is the Word (1930), followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning (1932).[7] As recognition for Beauty, a play about rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a contest.[2]:15

At Mizzou, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not seem to have fit in well with his fraternity brothers. According to Hale, 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, according to Hale, "tinged him with [his mother's] snobbery and detachment from reality."[2]:15 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."[3]:xi

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.[2]:15 By the mid-1930s his father's increasing alcoholism and abusive temper (he had part of his ear bitten off in a poker game fight) finally led Edwina to separate from him although they never divorced.

In 1936 Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis where he wrote the play Me Vashya (1937). In 1938 he earned a degree 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."[8] 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.

Early influences

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 "[his] great quality, aside from his prose style, is this fearless expression of brute nature."[3]:xi

Career

With director Elia Kazan, 1967

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).[9]

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."[10] 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. Although 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."[3]:xv

Williams walking to the service for Dylan Thomas, 1953.

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.

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 partner Merlo, and in and out of treatment facilities under the control of his mother and brother Dakin, Williams spiraled downward. Kingdom of Earth (1967), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1973), The Two Character Play (also called Out Cry, 1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1976), Vieux Carré (1978), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) and others were all 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”(Spoto 335), 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” (Spoto 331). Leverich explains that 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” (xxiii). 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.

Personal life

Williams remained close to his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young adult and later institutionalized following a lobotomy, visiting her at the facilities where she spent most of her adult life and paying for her care.[11] The devastating effects of Rose's illness may have contributed to his alcoholism and his dependence on various combinations of amphetamines and barbiturates.[12]

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 (1920–2010) and his then partner Fred Melton. In the summer of 1940 Williams initiated an affair with Kip Kiernan (1918–1944), 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 (1922–1963), an occasional actor of Sicilian heritage who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II.

Frank Merlo in Key West, 1950
Last will and testament of Tennessee Williams

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[13] 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.[citation needed] He was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.

Death

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 his brother Dakin Williams' insistence, 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[14] from her part of the Williams estate to The University of the South as well.

Posthumous recognition

From February 1 to July 21, 2011, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the home of Williams' archive, exhibited 250 of his personal items. The exhibit, entitled "Becoming Tennessee Williams," included a collection of Williams manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and artwork.[1]

In late 2009, Williams was inducted into the Poet's Corner at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. Performers who took part in his induction included Vanessa Redgrave, John Guare, Eli Wallach, Sylvia Miles, Gregory Mosher, and Ben Griessmeyer.[15]

The Tennessee Williams Theater in Key West, Florida, is named for him.

At the time of his death, Williams had been working on a final play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere,[16] which attempted to reconcile certain forces and facts of his own life, a theme which ran throughout his work, as Elia Kazan had said. As of September 2007, author Gore Vidal was in the process of completing the play, and Peter Bogdanovich was slated to direct its Broadway debut.[17]

The Williams family home in Columbus, Mississippi, was recently renovated and reopened.[18]

Williams's literary legacy is represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt.

Williams was honored by the U.S. Postal Service on a stamp in 1994 as part of their literary arts series.

Bibliography

Characters in his plays are often seen as representations of his family members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was understood to be modeled on Rose. Some biographers believed that the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is also based on her.

Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was generally seen to represent Williams' mother, Edwina. Characters such as Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer were understood to represent Williams himself. In addition, he used a lobotomy operation as a motif in Suddenly, Last Summer.

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. These two plays were later filmed, with great success, by noted directors Elia Kazan (Streetcar) with whom Williams developed a very close artistic relationship, and Richard Brooks (Cat). Both plays included references to elements of Williams' life such as homosexuality, mental instability, and alcoholism. Although The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was at first considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., chairman of the Board, had seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and thought it worthy of the drama prize. The Board went along with him after considerable discussion.[19]

Williams wrote The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer when he was 29 and worked on it sporadically throughout his life. A semi-autobiographical depiction of his 1940 romance with Kip Kiernan in Provincetown, Massachusetts, it was produced for the first time on October 1, 2006 in Provincetown by the Shakespeare on the Cape production company, as part of the First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

Other works by Williams include Camino Real and Sweet Bird of Youth.

His last play went through many drafts as he was trying to reconcile what would be the end of his life.[15] There are many versions of it, but it is referred to as In Masks Outrageous and Austere.

Plays

Apprentice plays

Major plays

Novels

Screenplays and teleplays

Short stories

  • The Vengeance of Nitocris (1928)
  • The Field of Blue Children (1939)
  • The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin (1951)
  • Hard Candy: A Book of Stories (1954)
  • Three Players of a Summer Game and Other Stories (1960)
  • The Knightly Quest: a Novella and Four Short Stories (1966)
  • One Arm and Other Stories (1967)
    • "One Arm"
    • "The Malediction"
    • "The Poet"
    • "Chronicle of a Demise"
    • "Desire and the Black Masseur"
    • "Portrait of a Girl in Glass"
    • "The Important Thing"
    • "The Angel in the Alcove"
    • "The Field of Blue Children"
    • "The Night of the Iguana"
    • "The Yellow Bird"
  • Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: a Book of Stories (1974)
  • Tent Worms (1980)
  • It Happened the day the Sun Rose, and Other Stories (1981)

One-act plays

Tennessee Williams wrote over 70 one-act plays during his lifetime. The one-acts explored many of the same themes that dominated his longer works. Williams' major collections are published by New Directions in New York City.

Poetry

Selected works

  • Gussow, Mel and Holditch, Kenneth, eds. Tennessee Williams, Plays 1937–1955 (Library of America, 2000) ISBN 978-1-883011-86-4.
    • Spring Storm
    • Not About Nightingales
    • Battle of Angels
    • I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
    • From 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946)
      • 27 Wagons Full of Cotton
      • The Lady of Larkspur Lotion
      • The Last of My Solid Gold Watches
      • Portrait of a Madonna
      • Auto-da-Fé
      • Lord Byron's Love Letter
      • This Property Is Condemned
    • The Glass Menagerie
    • A Streetcar Named Desire
    • Summer and Smoke
    • The Rose Tattoo
    • Camino Real
    • From 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1953)
      • "Something Wild"
      • Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen
      • Something Unspoken
    • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
  • Gussow, Mel and Holditch, Kenneth, eds. Tennessee Williams, Plays 1957–1980 (Library of America, 2000) ISBN 978-1-883011-87-1.
    • Orpheus Descending
    • Suddenly, Last Summer
    • Sweet Bird of Youth
    • Period of Adjustment
    • The Night of the Iguana
    • The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
    • The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
    • The Mutilated
    • Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle)
    • Small Craft Warnings
    • Out Cry
    • Vieux Carré
    • A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur

Related works

Former assistant of Tennessee Williams, Scott Keenan's book Walking on Glass: A Memoir of the Later Days of Tennessee Williams was released in 2011 by Alyson Books. John Uecker has also directed Williams' plays in addition to creating an edit of In Masks Outrageous and Austere.[citation needed]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b "Becoming Tennessee Williams" Exhibit at the University of Texas, Austin, Feb. 1 to July 31, 2011
  2. ^ a b c d e Hale, Allean; Roudané, Matthew Charles (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, Cambridge Univ. Press (1997)
  3. ^ a b c d Williams, Tennessee; Thornton, Margaret Bradham. Notebooks, Yale Univ. Press (2006)
  4. ^ Tennessee Williams and John Waters (2006), Memoirs, New Directions Publishing, 274 pages ISBN 0-8112-1669-1
  5. ^ USgennet.org
  6. ^ "Notable Alumni – Department of Theatre – University of Missouri". University of Missouri. http://theatre.missouri.edu/people/alumni.html. Retrieved 2011-02-23. 
  7. ^ "Manuscript Materials – Division of Special Collections, Archives and Rare Books". University of Missouri. http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/specialcollections/manuscript.htm. Retrieved 2011-03-18. 
  8. ^ Tennessee State Historical Marker 2 May 2008.
  9. ^ HNOC.org
  10. ^ Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 1997, p. 171
  11. ^ Philip Kolin, Something Cloudy, Something Clear: Tennessee Williams's Postmodern Memory Play. Spring 1998. Retrieved: 28 May 2010.
  12. ^ "The Kindness of Strangers", Spoto
  13. ^ Jeste ND, Palmer BW, Jeste DV. Tennessee Williams. Am J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2004 Jul–Aug;12(4):370-5. PMID 15249274 [1]
  14. ^ New York Times obituary, September 7, 1996
  15. ^ a b Rand, Susan (2009-11-15). "Photo Gallery: Tennessee Williams inducted into Poets’ Corner – - Wicked Local Wellfleet". Wickedlocal.com. http://www.wickedlocal.com/wellfleet/fun/entertainment/arts/x2087397507/Photo-Gallery-Tennessee-Williams-inducted-into-Poets-Corner. Retrieved 2011-02-23. 
  16. ^ "Cover-up in Tennessee Williams's death". New York Post. 2010-02-15. http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/tennessee_death_myth_OjzkpyFjmyFnwEmBXQVSKK. Retrieved 2011-02-23. 
  17. ^ "A 'new' Tennessee Williams play reaches Broadway". New York Daily News. 2007-09-11. http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/bwiddicombe/2007/09/11/2007-09-11_a_new_tennessee_williams_play_reaches_br.html. Retrieved 2011-02-23. 
  18. ^ Ryan Poe (2010-09-10). "Newly renovated Tennessee Williams home debuts – The Dispatch". The Commercial Dispatch. http://www.cdispatch.com/lifestyles/article.asp?aid=7802. Retrieved 2011-02-23. 
  19. ^ Fischer, Heinz-Dietrich & Erika J. Fischer. The Pulitzer Prize Archive: A History and Anthology of Award-Winning Materials in Journalism, Letters, and Arts München: K.G. Saur, 2008. ISBN 3-598-30170-7 ISBN 978-3-598-30170-4 p. 246

References

  • Gross, Robert F., ed. Tennessee Williams: A Casebook. Routledge (2002). ISBN 0-8153-3174-6.
  • Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (1997). ISBN 0-393-31663-7.
  • Saddik, Annette. The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays (London: Associated University Presses, 1999).
  • Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Da Capo Press (Reprint, 1997). ISBN 0-306-80805-6.
  • Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday (1975). ISBN 0-385-00573-3.
  • Williams, Dakin. His Brother's Keeper: The Life and Murder of Tennessee Williams.
  • Sewanee, The University of the South
  • Jacobus, Lee. "The Bedford Introduction to Drama". (Boston: Bedford, 2009)

External links


 
 
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Williams, Dakin (Quotes By)
Orpheus Descending (1991 Drama Film)
Tenn (2010 Drama Film)

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