Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

1. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) • Dramatist and fiction writer; one of America's major mid-20th-century playwrights. • Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911. • Williams died in New York City, February 25, 1983.

2. When Williams was about 13, his family moved to a crowded tenement in St. Louis, Missouri. At the age of 16 he published his first story. At 17 he entered the University of Missouri but left before receiving a degree.

3. 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.

4. The Glass Menagerie changed Williams' fortunes • Autobiographical piece • The play opened in Chicago in December 1944 and in New York in March • It received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award

5. When A Streetcar Named Desire opened in 1947, New York audiences knew a major playwright had arrived. It won a Pulitzer Prize. • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

6. Williams also wrote fiction, including two novels, one autobiography and four volumes of short stories • Over 100 poems written • Nine of his plays were made into films • He wrote one original screenplay, Baby Doll (1956).

7. Suffered from depression after death of his partner in 1961 • 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.