Mississippi-born playwright of Glass Menagerie fame
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), born Thomas Lanier Williams III, stands with O’Neill and Miller atop twentieth-century American drama. The Glass Menagerie in 1944 broke through after a quiet 1930 debut; later landmarks included A Streetcar Named Desire, then Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana across the next two decades.
Born in Columbus, Mississippi, to a family with Huguenot, Welsh and English roots, he was the second child of Edwina Dakin and Cornelius Coffin Williams, a travelling shoe salesman who drank heavily and was often away. Diphtheria nearly killed him as a small boy and left him frail and housebound for a year. When he was eight his father was promoted to the International Shoe Company head office in St. Louis, and the family's fights and frequent moves around the city followed.
He studied journalism at the University of Missouri from 1929 to 1931, but after he failed a military training course his father pulled him out and put him to work in the shoe factory. He wrote at night on coffee and cigarettes, and by his twenty-fourth birthday he had suffered a nervous breakdown and quit; a factory co-worker from those years fed into the character of Stanley Kowalski. He wrote Me, Vashya at Washington University in St. Louis, then took an English degree from the University of Iowa in August 1938.
Lean years followed, including a stint minding a chicken ranch in Laguna Beach. In 1939 his agent Audrey Wood helped him win a $1,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant for Battle of Angels, which flopped in Boston in 1940. In New Orleans he took writing work with the Works Progress Administration, living at one point at 722 Toulouse Street in the French Quarter, later the setting of Vieux Carré. The grant also caught Hollywood's eye, and MGM hired him on a six-month contract at $250 a week.
The Glass Menagerie, grown from his 1943 story Portrait of a Girl in Glass, opened in Chicago in the winter of 1944 to 1945 before becoming an instant Broadway hit, and Elia Kazan went on to direct many of his greatest plays. A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 sealed his standing. Much of his work reached the screen, and he also published stories, poems, essays and memoirs before entering the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979.
Source: Tennessee Williams
