The Night of the Iguana (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. He was the son of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina (maiden name, Dakin) Williams. Williams’s father, a traveling salesman, was rarely home for Williams and his elder sister Rose. The children and their mother lived with her parents in Tennessee until 1918. That year, Cornelius Williams moved the family to St. Louis when he was hired as the sales manager for a shoe company. Williams began writing as a child, publishing poetry in his junior newspaper. In high school, he published short stories in national magazines.

After graduating from high school in 1929, Williams entered the University of Missouri, Columbia. Williams considered becoming a journalist, but he was forced to leave after two years due to financial hardship caused by the Great Depression. Williams went to work at his father’s employer, the International Shoe Company, where he was miserable. Williams returned to college for a year at St. Louis’s Washington University, before being forced to drop out again. Williams finally finished his degree at the University of Iowa in 1938.

Williams had begun writing plays as early as 1935, producing them locally. He dubbed himself Tennessee Williams in 1939, based on a nickname he acquired at Iowa for his Southern accent. Based on a group of his plays, Williams won the Group Theater prize in 1939. This led to wider recognition as well as a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940. Williams made his living writing, even spending a half a year as a screenwriter for MGM in 1943. The experience and form did not suit him, and Williams turned to plays full time by 1944.

In 1944, Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie which firmly established his literary reputation. He won numerous accolades for the play, which had some basis in Williams’s own life. Between 1944 and 1972, Williams produced over a dozen plays, many of which were extremely successful. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for drama twice, the first for what many critics consider his best play, 1947’s A Street Car Named Desire, and the second for 1955’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Williams called his style “poetic naturalism” — referring to the poetic edge present in his style of dramatic realism. Williams’s last big hit in this vein was 1962’s Night of the Iguana.

After Iguana, Williams’s plays differed in form and content, and many were not critically acclaimed nor commercially successful; many were seen as derivative of his earlier work. Williams suffered a mental collapse in the late 1960s, spending several weeks in a psychiatric hospital. His last minor success was in 1972 with Small Craft Warnings. Williams continued to write plays as well as novels and short stories, until his death on February 24, 1983.